Decoding Greatness by Ron Friedman

Author:Ron Friedman [Friedman, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

How Athletes See the Future

When Tony Romo announced his retirement from professional football in the spring of 2017, the response the league over was a collective shrug.

For nearly a decade, Romo had served as the Dallas Cowboys’ starting quarterback, helming a period in the team’s history that could only be described as underwhelming. His last few years were particularly forgettable. Mired with injuries to his back and neck, Romo had been relegated to the sidelines for months at a time and had long ago lost his starting job to the younger, more dynamic Dak Prescott.

In the end, to the casual fan, the two most memorable facts about Romo were that he had once inexplicably botched the hold of an easy field goal, costing his team the season, and that in 2007, he had dated Jessica Simpson.

So when, a few months after his football retirement, Romo made his live television debut as an NFL analyst, expectations were understandably low. Romo had exactly zero broadcasting experience and was younger than some of the quarterbacks he was “professionally” analyzing. “Tony is a work in progress,” the chairman of CBS Sports admitted, sounding less than confident. No one knew what to expect. Thirty minutes before his first telecast, Romo’s producer pulled him aside and tried to center him: “Just be yourself.”

By the time the playoffs rolled around that season, Romo’s performances had become one of the biggest football stories of the year. He was earning rave reviews everywhere—from producers, players, fans—and not just because of his intoxicating enthusiasm. It was because of Romo’s uncanny ability to do something no one in the broadcast booth had ever done before: forecast plays before they occurred.

Starting with his first telecast, Romo would look down at the field and detail precisely what the offense was about to do, well before the snap. Then he would glance out at the opposing team’s defensive scheme and call out its strategy with equal precision. He would do this repeatedly, week after week, astonishing fans with what appeared to be a mystical mind-reading ability. Before too long, the internet erupted with Romo memes, branding him “Romo-stradamus” for his clairvoyant abilities. The Wall Street Journal was moved to analyze Romo’s predictive abilities, examining the 2,599 calls he had made as a broadcaster. Its conclusion: Romo is right more than 68 percent of the time. For context, they provided a striking comparison: that’s a percentage higher than Romo’s throwing accuracy as a professional quarterback.

Romo’s predictive abilities are undoubtedly impressive. What they are not, however, is superhuman or even unusual. At least not among professional quarterbacks, who receive extensive training on reading and adjusting to opposing teams’ formations. Enhanced anticipation is a common feature of expertise, and not just in football. It’s a skill researchers have observed across a wide range of domains.

Now, suppose we somehow convinced Tony Romo to join us in the lab for a few imaging scans, allowing us to monitor his brain activity as he broadcasts an NFL game. What insights

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