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Marshmallows and Pro Drafts
April 26th, 2020It’s too bad that pro sports teams cannot go back in time and give potential draftees what is known as the marshmallow test.
The results would no doubt help these multi-million-dollar franchises to find hidden gems and to avoid draft disasters.
Led by psychologist Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University, the marshmallow test studied delayed gratification.
It addressed the question, “Who can give up what they want NOW for what they want MOST?
Researchers say the results do a good job of predicting outcomes that range all the way from success to jail.
In the experiment, devised in the early ’70s, 4-year-olds were offered a choice between one immediate reward or two rewards if they waited for a period of time.
You can learn more in this video. And as Joachim de Posada points out in this TED talk, there’s more than marshmallows at stake.
The test is really about discipline and self-control. Can you study when you want to party? Diet when you want to eat? Work out when you feel like staying in bed? Persist when you feel like quitting? All of those questions matter in sports (as well as in school, business and in facing life’s ups and downs).
Of course, only a few people have ever taken the test, so there is no database that teams can examine. And the test only answers the question of which children have self-control, not the question of why.
Still, it’s a reminder that predictors do exist. Finding them would make a difference, whether in the recent NFL draft, or in the upcoming NHL, NBA and MLB events.
NFL Draft’s First-Round Gem
April 25th, 2020If you’re looking for a hidden gem from the first round of the 2020 NFL draft, keep an eye Brandon Aiyuk.
Three factors make Aiyuk, taken by the San Francisco 49ers with the 25th overall pick, a player to watch when the coronavirus allows play to resume.
First, Aiyuk has shown a consistent ability to improve. In an analysis on the day after the first round, CBSSports.com pointed out that Aiyuk wasn’t on the radar screen coming out of high school, and was ranked No. 136 among junior college players in 2018 out of Sierra College. That shows continuous improvement, often a tip-off to a hidden gem who suddenly races ahead of players who once seemed much better. Improvement gives a deep look into character. No one can improve without focus, hard work, a willingness to be coached, and the toughness to meet challenges. So far, Aiyuk has shown that.
Second, the 49ers seem to know what they’re doing. Besides getting to Super Bowl LIV, they were rated No. 1 by NFL.com for their 2019 draft. Their top two picks, Nick Bosa and Deebo Samuel, both became impact players. In 2018, General Manager John Lynch’s second draft in San Francisco produced a grade of B. And ESPN.com rated San Francisco’s 2017 draft class as “above average.” Past performance is no guarantee for how this year’s crop turns out. But under Lynch, the Niners seem to have a good eye.
Finally, the 49ers gave up a lot to get Aiyuk. If he flops, the fans and media will remind him every day. That could add to the pressure that comes with being a first-round pick.
No doubt this year’s draft will produce its share of flops and hidden gems. Right now a player who was barely on the radar screen coming out of high school could wind up being a find.
Hurricane Scale
September 2nd, 2019Born in 1917 in Brooklyn, NY, this man grew up to be a civil engineer. At the age of 30 he went to work for Dade County, Fla., updating the local building code. Important work to be sure, but nothing glamorous or historic. But one thing would set this hidden gem apart. He had developed a very specific fascination for one aspect of his work — hurricanes. According to Wikipedia, he became a leading advocate for stricter codes in hurricane-prone zones. In 1965 while working on a United Nations-commissioned study of windstorm damage on low-cost housing, he developed a scale to categorize the intensity of hurricanes. His name was Herbert Saffir, and you often hear about his work. Today, hurricanes — like the Category 5 Hurricane Dorian — are measured on to the Saffir-Simpson scale.
Valerie Harper’s Secret Weapon
September 1st, 2019Valerie Harper, who died Friday, knew more people than other children did when she was growing up. That’s because her family moved often. They lived in Massachusetts, California, Oregon and New Jersey. Harper said in her memoir, “I, Rhoda,” that she made friends easily.
It makes you wonder how many of those children with whom Harper crossed paths looked at her on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and remembered her as the kid in their school. And it makes you wonder further if any of those children could ever have predicted that this classmate would achieve such fame.
They might have seen the future had they known Harper’s secret.
The secret was Harper’s mother.
She was a teacher.
She taught all eight grades at once in a one-room schoolhouse in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Why is that important?
Anecdotal evidence suggests that children of teachers and coaches might achieve more than others.
That nugget comes from John Cook, longtime volleyball coach at the University of Nebraska. He has noticed a special quality in such offspring, and he attributes it to the fact that teachers and coaches love what they do. They’re not in it for the money, and they understand that success requires hard work.
Again, the information is anecdotal only. (It would make a marvelous 20-year study for those of you looking for an interesting doctoral thesis.)
What did Harper’s mother do?
Among other things, she encouraged the children to be open to new experiences. So at a young age Valerie would go to New York and soak in the culture. When it came time for the family to move back to Oregon from New Jersey, Valerie’s mom insisted she stay behind to continue her dancing lessons.
It paid off. Not only did Valerie get better, but she was closer to auditions. Before long, she was in show business and things took off from there.
Falling Football Stock
September 1st, 2019Drafted with high hopes in April, cut in August. That’s the reality for Jachai Polite, taken by the Jets in the third round of the NFL draft. This story in the New York Post explores the how and why of Polite’s fall.
Polite came to the Jets via a 68th-overall pick, a move that now looks like a mistake. GM Mike Maccagnan, who made the selection, is out of a job, though not for this pick only.
Polite is still just 21 years old, which means there is still time for him to make a career in pro football. Will he prove the Jets wrong for letting him go? Will another team pick him up? Or was the whole thing a mistake from the start?
On one level, Polite’s story is just another reminder of how hard it is to predict performance. But there’s also reason to think that enough warning signs were there on Polite. Said the Post: “(He) was projected as a first-round pick by some before the scouting combine, but his draft stock plummeted after a poor workout and some bad interviews. There were also questions about his maturity. The Jets felt they were getting a steal in the third round, but it is pretty clear that coach Adam Gase was not on board with this pick by Maccagnan, who was fired a few weeks after the draft.”
The Jets thought they were getting steal. But now it appears they were left empty-handed.
The Tyler Skaggs Tragedy
August 31st, 2019The silver lining, if there could ever be such a thing when it comes to a fatal drug interaction, is that the death of Angels’ pitcher Tyler Skaggs could bring more attention to the issue of opioids.
After all, big-league athletes are not supposed to die. Not when they are in full youth. And yet Skaggs did. He had fentanyl and oxycodone along with alcohol in his system, an autopsy found.
At a time like this, people search desperately for the why. To think that such a death could have no meaning would be unbearable.
It is a fact of life — though unfair — that the death of a celebrity gathers more attention than the demise of someone who isn’t known by the general public.
In this light, it would not be surprising to Skaggs’ death bring fresh urgency to a scourge that claimed 47,000 American lives in 2017.
Addiction on the court
August 31st, 2019Here’s a side of tennis you don’t often hear about. But this story just underlines the fact that addiction does not discriminate. Your race, color, creed, religion, skill level, line of work, achievements, or gender … none of it matters.
Interviewed by Dr. Lipi Roy, 1993 French Open doubles champion Murphy Jensen discusses the highs, the roots of his addiction, his recovery and his effort to help other addicts.
It gives new meaning to the phrase, “All in.”
Nobody Wanted Him. Now He’s a Star
February 18th, 2019You can bet that more than one Division I basketball coach would love a 6-foot-6 guard/forward with a scoring touch. Well, hundreds of coaches had a shot at just such a player — and passed.
Meet Raiquan Clark of LIU Brooklyn, leading scorer in the Northeast Conference. He’s a star. Four years ago, in search of scholarship money, he emailed every D-I school in the country.
“Every school, I promise you,” Clark recently told The New York Post. “I’d wake up and do some, and do some more before I went to sleep, and I kept going for like a week. And I just waited for a reply.”
Only two schools bothered to reply, and neither one offered anything. So Clark walked on at LIU Brooklyn.
“It’s not like he was a recruited walk-on,” former LIU coach Jack Perri said. “It was like, we need another body, and we didn’t want a 5-9 kid. It was, as long as he understands it’s something where he’s not gonna be playing and he’s gonna be a practice player.”
Clark is no longer a practice player. He’s just another example of a hidden gem — a superstar hiding in plain sight. It wasn’t long before Perri knew he had a player with extraordinary focus, driven by a wish to help his mom with tuition.
“He’s a tremendous athlete and he has a unique motor, and by the end of the year, it was obvious he was going to be in our plans going forward,” Perri said. “He was getting shots in at 7 in the morning, he was working out at midnight. He was obsessed with, ‘I’m getting myself good enough so that you have to give me a scholarship, so my mom won’t have to pay for college.’ I have such immense respect for him for the hard work he put in. He just willed himself.”
That’s the thing about hidden gems. You can’t measure what’s inside them. You can’t see what drives them. But you can give someone a chance. Because there are hidden gems everywhere.
Derek Kellogg, Clark’s current coach at LIU Brooklyn, is one of the coaches who passed on Clark. He used to be at Massachusetts and, “I probably got one (email) and shuffled it aside.”
Now Kellogg knows that you never know.
“The second pick in the draft is gonna come from Murray State [Ja Morant],” Kellogg said. “That goes to show there are a lot of players out there. You just have to find the right ones.”
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Whatever you’re doing, you can use The Improvement Factor be better at it.
How Much of Making the Hall of Fame Is Pure Chance?
December 13th, 2018The recent election that put Harold Baines and Lee Smith into baseball’s Hall of Fame sparked more dispute than an umpire’s mistake.
Baines, in particular, is seen by critics as a good player who does not deserve to be enshrined with the sport’s immortals. And Tony La Russa, himself a member of the Hall of Fame, dismissed Baines’ critics with a terse shot of profanity. It made for colorful TV, especially in a week in which the sport’s annual Winter Meetings failed to produce much in the way of news.
But leaving aside the question of qualifications, what if we instead were to ask, “How much does pure chance have to do with achieving greatness?” How much can brief but significant events explain those two perplexing groups:
1. Draft flops — those who are chosen high but who never make it?
2. Hidden gems who emerge as stars?
Smith belongs to neither group. He was a highly regarded prospect, making it big after being taken in the second round of the 1975 amateur draft. But his life had its share of pure chance. First, baseball was not on young Smith’s radar screen. But, according to a Society of Baseball Research article by Neal Poloncarz, “One day in his junior year of high school, as he walked across the outfield of a softball field during practice, a ball rolled to his feet, beyond the outfielders. Lee picked it up and heaved it to home plate. After the softball coach witnessed this, Smith was switched from the softball team to the baseball team.”
That episode alone did not put Smith on a track to baseball. Tall and sturdy, he could have chosen basketball, and indeed planned to play at Northwestern State in Louisiana. After a chat with Joe Adcock, a former player, Smith turned pro in baseball.
Four years into his career, Smith was still in the minor leagues. Randy Hundley, minor-league pitching coach for the Chicago Cubs, suggested he become a relief pitcher. It turned out to be fateful advice, but Smith didn’t see it that way. He took it as a demotion, and returned to basketball.
That’s when Billy Williams, a Cubs great, paid Smith a visit and persuaded him to give baseball another try. Back in baseball, Smith got advice from, among others, future Hall of Fame pitcher Ferguson Jenkins, and noted pitching coach Billy Connors.
So:
What if Smith had never wandered across that outfield during softball practice? What if he had ignored the ball at his feet instead of hurling it to home plate, or rolled it back in? What if the softball coach had not seen his prodigious throw? What if Adcock had told Smith to go to college and pursue basketball? What if Randy Hundley had never made Smith into a reliever? Or if Billy Williams had never bothered to come to Smith’s house?
The constant thread in Smith’s young life, of course, was his enormous strength and undeniable talent. But lots of people have that, and never go anywhere. But fate put the right people in Smith’s path, and he was smart enough to seek out and receive advice.
The Worst Hiring Decision in NFL History
September 20th, 2018It goes without saying that a single hiring decision can affect an organization for years. No one needs to remind fans of the New York Giants and New England Patriots.
That’s because either one of those teams could have wound up with superstar coach Bill Belichick — and only one of them did.
The story comes in a new book “Belichick: The Making of the Greatest Football Coach of All Time,” by Ian O’Connor.
In 1991, the Giants needed a new coach. Bill Parcels had retired, having led them to championships in Super Bowl XXV and Super Bowl XXI.
At the time, Belichick worked for the Giants, an invisible gem, a superstar hiding in plain sight. He wanted the head coaching job, according to O’Connor’s book. But George Young, the Giants’ general manager at the time, did not want Belichick. Here are the reasons for that fateful choice. “This is an ex-lacrosse player,” O’Connor relates Young’s thinking. “He’s a disheveled-looking mess most of the time.”
Young was right about the way Belichick dressed and about Belichick’s lacrosse background. But his decision on whom to hire could not have been more wrong.
Under Belichick, the Patriots have made it to eight Super Bowls, winning five. They could get there again this season.
Meanwhile, the Giants — who did win two Super Bowls since letting Belichick get away — have lost their first two games this season and have made the playoffs only once in the last six years.
As for Handley, the man the Giants hired instead of Belichick, he lasted two seasons as a coach in the NFL. He won 14 games and lost 18. And remember that Young hired him in part because he made a better appearance than Belichick did.
It’s easy, of course, to criticize hiring decisions once they have been made. But it’s also useful to know that for every hiring decision, there is an invisible gem being overlooked. The Patriots found one. The Giants lost one. And the rest is history.