What Do Football Players Know?
One of the great ironies of the sports world is that football players are believed to be more brawny than brainy—even though football is much more a head game than any other major team sport. You may be thinking, “Yeah, right, ‘head game,’ as in ‘heads colliding with heads,’ resulting in more concussions per capita than in baseball, basketball, or soccer …combined.” Fair enough. Perhaps the only sport that tops football in serious head injuries is boxing, where dementia pugilistica is a sobering blight. But I'm talking about football as a mental game, where complex cognitive behavior plays a role equal to that of the size, strength, and speed of players’ bodies.
Compare football with baseball. I'm an Angels fan myself. But let's face it: in baseball, mental alertness is mostly episodic. On-field players focus their acuity during that infinitesimal interval between windup and the swing of the bat. Most of the time, catching fly balls is pro forma. Ever notice the impassive nonchalance of an outfielder following a routine catch? His expression says, “I coulda’ done that in my sleep.” And I'm thinking, “Maybe he did.” During any given play, offensive players in the dugout are sitting or standing around with their minds on who knows what. It probably isn't baseball. Baseball players set a good example for the fans at the ballpark, too. Mentally active spectators are more likely to be reading the Wall Street Journal or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason than watching the next pitch. If baseball is America's favorite pastime, it's probably because the pastoral atmosphere of the ballpark is so, well, relaxing. (Mike Scioscia, I hope you're not reading this.)1
What about basketball? Well, who is pro basketball's most famous fan? Did you say Jack Nicholson? I rest my case.2
Football is a game for thinkers, both on and off the field. There's a lot you have to know just to understand the game. But the thing is, many people don't know that. They pass the television set, see one play, and think, “I don't get it. It just looks like a bunch of guys bashing their heads together and piling on top of each other for no particular reason.” It doesn't help that football icons like Vince Lombardi dole out dainty aphorisms like, “Football isn't a contact sport; it's a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.”3 Frank Gifford wrote in Sports Illustrated that “pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors.”4 There are a lot of women out there wondering, “Who wants to spend his weekend sitting in a La-Z-Boy, a Bud Lite in one hand and a bag of chips in the other, watching a nuclear war?”5
Novices have to understand the game. For that we have Howie Long's helpful book Football for Dummies.6 The field has a mystifying arrangement of marks, obviously ordered and apparently for some purpose. At any given time there are usually twenty-two players on the field. And each team has an offensive unit of eleven players and a defensive unit of eleven other players.7 Within each unit, individual players have specialized roles. The offensive unit includes a quarterback, a center, various running backs (halfbacks, fullbacks), guards and tackles, tight ends, and wide receivers; the defensive unit includes a nose tackle, defensive tackles, defensive ends, linebackers, cornerbacks, and safeties. Then there are the placekickers and punters. Each player has a job to do, and some have several responsibilities.
Today's game also requires seven officials who scrutinize aspects of each play and make immediate decisions about penalties, pass completions, turnovers, downs, and ball placement. These instantaneous decisions require intimate knowledge of an elaborate array of rules governing fair play.
I'm not making a serious argument that football is an intellectually superior sport. In what follows, my aim is to describe aspects of the game that illustrate a few principles from the field of epistemology. As we get under way, you need to know that epistemology is a branch of philosophy designated using the Greek word for “knowledge”: episteme. Epistemology focuses on such issues as the nature of knowledge and the kinds of knowledge we have, sources of knowledge, and challenges to the conviction that we have knowledge.
What Do Running Backs Know?
More quarterbacks and running backs are awarded an MVP award than any other players, by a huge margin. Howie Long believes that running backs have “the toughest job on the football field.” He writes, “No matter how fast an athlete is, or how big a brute he is, or how slippery or quick he is, he will not be able to play this position if he doesn't have a brain and can't think on his feet.”8 He goes on to list the sorts of things that a running back must know:
These are samples of what a running back must know. But that's not all. He must be able to act appropriately on the basis of what he knows—on every play. This is his responsibility.
Much of the knowledge a running back uses on game day is knowledge that he possesses prior to the game—plays, player stats, and so forth. But he must acquire additional knowledge as the game unfolds and be able to make immediate use of this new knowledge. The running back will acquire valuable new knowledge as offensive and defensive players settle into their positions on the line of scrimmage. He will acquire valuable new knowledge the instant the ball is snapped and all players begin to move. He will acquire valuable new knowledge if the defense reads the play the offense had planned. He will acquire valuable new knowledge as unexpected opportunities open up. All of this knowledge will be acquired in a matter of seconds and split seconds. And the running back, with precious little time to deliberate, will make use of this knowledge.
This illustrates a number of deep epistemological points. For starters, there are situations where we will not even be able to know some things if we do not first know certain other things. Our running back will not be able to make use of the data presented to him in his surrounding environment during a play if he doesn't already know the rules of the game, the playbook, his general responsibilities, the significance of various defensive line arrangements, and so on. He won't even notice most of the important stuff that's going on, much less be able to make sense of it.
This business of “making sense” of what is noticed is more than a matter of cognitive achievement, like understanding what is happening. It includes being prepared to move into appropriate action, given what has been noticed and apprehended. For this, what a running back knows about what's happening in the moment must be connected to what he knows should be done when that is what is happening. Since every play has unique features, he will have to combine knowledge of general principles with his new knowledge of the situation and apply all of this to act properly in a novel situation, one that never has arisen before and will never arise again.
Philosophers distinguish between factual knowledge and competence knowledge. Factual knowledge, also called “propositional knowledge,” is knowledge that something is or is not the case. Competence knowledge is sometimes called “skill knowledge”; it's more a matter of knowing how to do something.10
The components of a running back's knowledge, as described above, seem to be a combination of factual and competence knowledge. And it appears that much factual knowledge is a prerequisite for competence knowledge. But there's another feature of responsible knowing that is worth considering at this point.
A person may have the knowledge required for acting appropriately in some situation but not act. The disposition to act on the basis of what one knows is different from being in the know. Armchair coaches and fantasy football players may have much of the same kind of knowledge that is used on the gridiron by actual players. But couch potatoes and computer geeks don't have the opportunity to act on the basis of what they know—at least, not in the real-world sense. And there's a huge difference between the knowledge used to second-guess a coach's decision, or the knowledge applied at a keyboard, and the knowledge that is embodied by being enacted in a real-world scenario, just the sort of scenario in which that kind of knowledge is most aptly deployed.
Knowledge is a key ingredient of responsible human behavior. Having the relevant body of knowledge, having the opportunity to make use of that knowledge in real-world situations, and having the inclination to act in that opportune moment all combine to explain the value of knowledge. There is a need for people in all walks of life to embrace this principle and go into the world prepared for responsible action, for their own sake and for the benefit of the larger world community (or “team”) of which they are a part.
Let's turn now to the quarterback, where we see this indicated in other ways.
What Do Quarterbacks Know?
University of Nebraska physics professor Timothy Gay teaches “football physics” online and in his book Football Physics: The Science of the Game.11 In one sixty-second online clip at his Football Physics Web site, he explains the concept of vectors and illustrates their significance when a quarterback throws a pass.12 Gay is at the University of Nebraska, and I happen to be a fan of the University of Southern California Trojans (I earned my PhD in philosophy at USC). So I'll illustrate the key points of this section with reference to the most recent game between these two teams, which just happens to have been played yesterday.
During one play in the fourth quarter, USC quarterback John David Booty rolled out to his right, threw down the field, and hit his receiver, who caught the ball just in time to plant a foot before going out of bounds. In this scenario, three vectors were critical to the success of the pass.
First, there's the moving vector of the USC quarterback as he runs with the ball to avoid a sack and spot his receiver. Second is the moving vector of the ball, thrown on the run. This vector extends from Booty's gun arm to the arms of his receiver. Finally, there's the moving vector of the receiver's own dash across the field to meet the ball at the proper location. There are three moving objects: the quarterback as he scrambles sideways, the ball as it flies through the air, and the receiver as he runs. Think of each vector as an imaginary line that traces the pathway of each object as it moves. Completion of the pass depends on whether these vectors are properly coordinated. And this depends on the speed of each of the three objects.
Imagine a different scenario. The quarterback is stationary when he cocks his arm to pass the ball. His receiver is fifteen yards downfield, and he, too, is stationary. The ball is caught. From quarterback to receiver is a pathway that represents the moving vector of the ball. This is the only vector in the scenario. Suppose the vector just happens to parallel the sidelines.
Returning to the real-world scenario of September 15, 2007, there are three vectors. Booty rolls out and cocks his arm as if to throw straight downfield parallel to the sidelines. But because he's moving when he releases the ball, the moving vector of the ball isn't going to be parallel to the sidelines, as it was in the case involving a stationary quarterback and a stationary receiver. The vector traced by the ball will be several degrees off. The specific difference in degree between a rollout pass and a stationary pass will depend on the speed of the quarterback as he rolls out. The greater the speed, the greater the degree of angle between the vector of the ball when thrown from a stationary position and the vector of the ball when thrown on the run. So Booty has to be aware of his speed.
But it isn't enough for Booty to know his speed. He also needs to know the speed the ball will be traveling along its vector, since that also will determine the final destination of the ball. And, to complicate things even more, he needs to know the speed of his receiver, who is running to meet the ball. In the fourth-quarter rollout play of September 15, the receiver had not even cleared himself from the defensive protection that had been set up against him when Booty threw the ball. Booty had to count on his receiver to break out of the defensive jam, pick the proper course to run, and run with the right speed to meet the ball …before stepping out of bounds.
In his online video about vectors and the game of football, Gay plays a clip from a rollout pass. He stops the action just as the ball is about to be released, then asks, “Where will the ball go?” He explains that this depends on the speed of the quarterback as he runs with the ball and the speed of the ball once it's thrown. At this point, Gay playfully says, “So you see, it's very important for a quarterback to figure in his speed on a rollout pass”—as if the quarterback literally calculates the difference in degree between one vector and another given his speed, and then deliberately uses that information to select the ideal point at which to release the ball to complete his pass.
Of course, a quarterback doesn't actually make a precise calculation of this kind. But he does need to be aware of his own running speed, the speed at which the ball will likely fly when released, and the running speed of the receiver. A successful quarterback will get it right a decent percentage of the time.
Let's stop to consider what counts as a decent pass-completion percentage. As of this writing, with the 2007 season under way, NFL quarterback Kurt Warner has a career pass-completion percentage of around 65.6, the best in NFL history. During the 2001 season, he completed 375 passes out of 546 attempts, for a percentage of 68.7. Warner is the recipient of NFL MVP awards for 1999 and 2001 and the Super Bowl MVP Award for Super Bowl XXXIV (2000). To be considered “most valuable player”—not once, not twice, but three times—is doing pretty well. But get this: on average, Kurt Warner missed on more than one-third of his passes! Not to ruin the party, but, come to think of it, that's a lot of incompletions.
Does this mean that completing a pass is usually a matter of luck? Not at all. A quarterback has to really know his stuff to make 65.6 percent of his passes. But what stuff does he have to know? What kind of knowledge does he have? And how does he come to have that knowledge?
A good quarterback knows how fast he can run flat out. And he knows how fast he can run under various conditions. His running speeds can be recorded with a stopwatch during practice. He knows how fast he can throw a football. So if he also knows the math, he should be able to calculate vectors of a flying football, plugging in speed variables for different hypothetical situations.
Would this kind of knowledge do him any good in an actual game? It would seem not. During actual play, he won't know the actual values of speed variables. And he wouldn't have time to work out the vectors even if he did have precise knowledge of the speed variables. Real-world play doesn't allow for such mathematical wizardry.
And yet, by working out times and experimenting with vectors during practice, the quarterback acquires knowledge that improves his chances of completing a rollout pass on game day. In the midst of play, when he has only split seconds to react, he can recognize a match between the real-time scenario as it unfolds and patterns he has learned during practice. He may even get to the point where he sights the vector the ball must travel with something like a sense of the number of degrees off the vector of his scramble.
We sometimes speak of “muscle memory” to explain practically instinctual behavior that requires spontaneous motion of the body and its extremities to accomplish a specific task. But the patterns of movement required to achieve the task are not literally etched in the memory of one's muscles. The behavior is still the physical effect of a cognitive activity.
Unless a celebrated quarterback's pass-completion record is a matter of sheer luck, it does seem that knowledge plays a role during a rollout pass. Through trial and error, the quarterback gains experience that contributes to his success. He runs a play. If things go more or less as planned, this gets tucked away for future reference. If the play blows up, he still learns something that can be put to good use later on. We could say that he acquires information. But he has to be able to act on that information. And in the game of football, that means that he has to be able to adapt the information he has to the unfolding particulars of a given play. This information isn't useful unless it can be put to use in novel circumstances. And it isn't useful if it can't be put to use spontaneously and on the run.
The rest of life can be like that, too. We rely on memory to navigate our world. What is logged there had better be reliable information—true, or mostly true, beliefs. And our access to that information had better be reliable. Often, we must be able to count on both the information and our access to it without attending to these things in an explicit way. It is a tribute to our cognitive powers that we are able to act so successfully in the world when so much is at stake.
Knowledge and the Intangibles of Play
Yesterday, when the Trojans (ranked number 1) faced the Nebraska Cornhuskers at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, it was game two for USC and game three for Nebraska. USC hadn't really been tested yet, since their only game had been against Idaho, an unranked opponent. At Idaho, two weeks before the Nebraska game, USC had won 38–10. The final score and the mixed quality of play left room for skeptics to rumble that USC was overrated.
On September 15, with several inexperienced freshmen playing key positions, USC would be confronted with an undefeated team ranked 14, a sea of red in the bleachers, and raucous noise from enthusiastic homegamers. On game day, the Orange County Register reported that Memorial Stadium (a football shrine) was the home of 285 consecutive sellouts! Mark Saxon, of the Register, suggested that “if you see a close-up of the eyes of freshmen [players], see if they look freaked out. If not, USC shouldn't be too bothered by the venue.”13
The venue. It's a potentially significant intangible on game day. For the home team, the atmosphere can energize. For the visiting team, it can confuse and demoralize. The visiting Trojans knew what to expect. They would have to let reason—a sober awareness of their actual knowledge of the game—prevail over emotion as the target of disturbing cacophony.
And so it is in ordinary experience. Our attention to what we know, when we most need to be focused on what we know, can be overwhelmed by the din of emotional turmoil in the circumstances of life. At such times it isn't enough to have a fund of knowledge; we must be mindful of the knowledge we have. Without mindfulness, our knowledge may be worthless. And we have an obligation, in the interest of cognitive fair play, to help each other toward the goal of acquiring true belief.
Epistemologists themselves can be guilty of diversion from this goal. A student enrolls in an introductory course in philosophy. She's required to read René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. Aided by some diversionary in-class commentary on this classic work, the student becomes paralyzed with the thought, “Maybe we don't really know anything!” This is precisely the effect desired by the instructor, who probably isn't himself a skeptic at all. The student needs to be reminded that she has plenty of evidence that she has vast quantities of knowledge, and no evidence that she has no knowledge. Against the natural conviction that she knows things, all she's given is the mere possibility, tricked out with clever thought experiments (like the Brain in a Vat experiment), that she doesn't have knowledge.
A “thought experiment” is the kind of experiment a philosopher performs to test the coherence of a theoretical claim using imagination only. One of the most famous thought experiments is due to René Descartes, who reasoned that he could be mistaken about nearly every belief he had. He imagined that an evil genius (malin génie) could be the cause of his beliefs. If our beliefs are caused by an evil genius, then our beliefs may all be false, and we wouldn't know it. An updated version of Descartes’ thought experiment suggests that I imagine the possibility that I am nothing more than a brain in a vat, and that a mad scientist has stuck electrodes into this brain to stimulate brain events that simulate what we take to be our ordinary set of experiences. Under these conditions, “I” (or rather, this brain in a vat) would have precisely the same sort of experiences with which I'm acquainted in the actual world. But is it the actual world that I'm acquainted with if I could be a brain in a vat? The evil genius scenario and the brain in a vat scenario are supposed to be genuine possibilities. So skepticism, some claim, can be induced in the basis of a mere logical possibility. However, possibility scenarios don't count as evidence that skepticism is true.
Philosopher Reinhardt Grossmann gives fair warning to those who defer too readily to the heroics of philosophers: “We must never underestimate the stubbornness of philosophers. In this respect, philosophers are not so different from the vulgar: Having finally, after much toil and trouble, arrived at their views, they are loath to give them up, no matter how silly they are. But in addition philosophers have a more perverse streak: They delight in shocking accepted opinion. Some philosophers, it seems, are only happy if they have arrived at absurd conclusions.”14
The not-entirely-fictional professor we have envisioned, with all of his credentials and aura of authority, has “home team” advantage. But the noise he makes on behalf of skepticism is a disservice to students.
It is fitting to conclude with this wise counsel from Etienne Gilson: “Philosophy does not consist of encouraging others to continue in false beliefs, and the worst way of persuading others to abandon their error is to appear to share the same error. There is only one truth, the same for all, and the highest good for a rational being is to know the truth. When a philosopher sees the truth he can only submit himself to it, for that is true wisdom; and when he has discovered the truth, the best thing he can do for others is share it with them, for that is true charity.”15
Notes
Sometimes a book title is worth the price of the book. In this case, the book wasn't even in print when I began writing this chapter. The main title of my chapter, “Inside the Helmet,” is “borrowed,” with due respect, from the book Inside the Helmet: Life as a Sunday Afternoon Warrior (New York: Gotham Books, 2007), by NFL Giants veteran Michael Strahan and NFL sideline reporter Jay Glazer.
1. What are the odds?
2. One of Nicholson's most famous movie lines is “You can't handle the truth!” exclaimed during courtroom testimony in the film A Few Good Men. Shortly after this outburst, he's heard muttering, “Hey, what's going on? I don't understand.”
3. Quoted in James Michener, Sports in America (New York: Random House, 1976), 13; see Leonard Roy Frank, Random House Webster's Quotationary (New York: Random House, 2001), 287.
4. Frank Gifford, Sports Illustrated, 4 July 1960; see Frank, Quotationary, 287.
5. Humor columnist Dave Barry is credited with the remark, “I have seen women walk right past a TV set with a football game on and—this always amazes me—not stop to watch, even if the TV is showing replays of what we call a ‘good hit,’ which is a tackle that causes at least one major internal organ to actually fly out of a player's body.” For this quote, see http://www.dontquoteme.com/search/quote_ display.jsp?quoteID=11616&gameID=1.
6. See Howie Long, Football for Dummies (Foster City, CA: IDG Books, 1998).
7. Rarely has a player in college football or the NFL played in both units for a team.
8. Long, Football for Dummies, 96.
9. See Long, Football for Dummies, 96–97.
10. For a standard discussion of kinds of knowledge, see Keith Lehrer, Theory of Knowledge (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), 2–5.
11. Timothy Gay, Football Physics: The Science of the Game (New York: Rodale, 2004). Gay played football at Cal Tech and earned his PhD in atomic physics from the University of Chicago.
12. See University of Nebraska, Department of Physics and Astronomy, “Football Physics with Dr. Tim Gay,” http://physics.unl.edu/outreach/football.html.
13. Mark Saxon, “Cornhuskers’ Red Carpet,” Orange County Register, 15 September 2007, Sports, p. 10.
14. Reinhardt Grossmann, The Fourth Way: A Theory of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 23.
15. Etienne Gilson, Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 215.