1) Tony Romo choked. Again. 2) Jason Garrett fucked up the play calling. Again. 3) Dallas' defense allowed Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos to score 51 points yesterday. These are the three most common "analyses" I heard on Twitter last night after the Cowboys lost what was the most entertaining and highest fantasy scoring game of the day, presented in exponential order of highest to lowest frequency. Sure there were tons of responses to the Romo choked narrative, rightfully so, as he had a career day and his numbers topped Manning's. And yes, the loss was devastating to Dallas fans, regardless of the numbers or the fact that they played Denver better than any other team so far has played them. What I heard only once, and I'm sorry I can't credit the tweeter, is that Danny Trevathan made a supremely athletic play on the Romo pass to get Denver the ball back and win them the game.
In the late fourth quarter or 9th inning of a tie game, pressure on athletes is at its peak. Every single man on the professional field is there because he has faced this pressure and succeeded. The stress one feels in this situation is akin to the fight or flight response the body experiences in the face of fear thanks to the autonomic nervous system. In fact, Jeff Wise touches on this reaction in his book, Extreme Fear. Wise recounts what psychologists have known for decades, that physical performance increases with stress to a point, then declines in cases of extreme stress. Interestingly, this inverted U-shaped performance curve doesn't apply only to physical performance, but cognitive performance as well. Mild stress enhances decision-making, learning, and memory abilities in laboratory studies. Chronic stress, however, impairs performance on these same tasks.
What controls stress, you might wonder? There are a lot of chemicals in the brain that react to stressful stimuli, but the main one is an increase in norepinephrine (NE) levels. NE in the brain is considered an arousal signal, it causes the neurons it reaches (and it reaches most of the neurons in the brain, particularly in the regions concerned with decision making and higher cognitive processing) to be more sensitive to other signals. Thus the brain is a little faster, working a little smoother, under the mild stress condition. It can allow for things like motor commands to muscles to occur with little conscious effort, particularly when the movements are routine, like swinging a bat or throwing a ball. Under levels of high or chronic stress however, too much NE can recruit areas of the brain that can override these smooth, automatic, "muscle memory" commands. In simple terms, too much stress can lead to overthinking. Rather than just throwing the ball, you may suddenly feel the pressure on your fingertips, consider the angle of the throwing arm, be conscious of the rotation in your hips as you plant the back foot, and so on. Things that normally don't register during the throw become conscious when the brain is jacked up on too much NE.
In this case, choking can occur, but it's not a foregone conclusion that choking will occur. I'm not a professional athlete, but after so many years of watching professional athletes in bars, I've become reasonably good at bar sports. When I just play, just feel the shots, whether in darts or pool, I'm pretty good. When I feel the pressure, I start to notice how my feet are positioned (or someone points it out, because I throw darts with my left foot forward-the "wrong" way for a righty), or how my grip on the cue stick feels, I'm in trouble. I'm overthinking, I'll over aim the shot, and often miss. The stress of the game itself or of other people critically analyzing my form gets the NE flowing in me, quickly pushing me down the far slope of the U. Thus I've personally instituted a two drink minimum for playing bar sports. Let me explain. Alcohol is a depressant, from a neurochemical standpoint. Because its mechanism of action works on almost all the neurons in the brain, it can counteract the effects of stress and too much NE. It dampens the brain's response to stimuli at low doses (just like stress, too many drinks impairs performance) allowing muscle memory to take over and peak performance to shine through. Now, obviously we can't have professional athletes doing shots on the sidelines in critical game situations, so what can they do?
The degree to which stress affects the brain and the performance is a very individual thing. Training is a critical variable in determining how much pressure will affect performance in any given person. More training=less effect of stress. Neurons are desensitized to stressful stimuli so that less NE is released, and/or neurons become less responsive to higher NE levels. The research on that is yet to be done. So let's go back to the Dallas interception. I don't believe Tony Romo choked here. The pass was into tight coverage, but not really ill-advised or even off the mark. Maybe rookie TE Gavin Escobar, the intended receiver, choked. Was he a step off his route? Couldn't get his hands where they needed to be? Certainly he has less experience in executing a game winning drive than Romo. Or maybe Danny Trevathan was just clutch yesterday. Maybe the pressure on the Denver linebacker in the face of losing the first game of the season pushed Trevathan into a state of peak performance and he made the clutch play of the week. Almost any player's choke can be viewed in light of the opponent's clutch performance in football or baseball. I say enough negativity, let's focus on the amazing that happens every week.
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