On Saturday November 30, 2024 the head coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes stood in the middle of the horseshoe stunned. Coach Ryan Day looked like he had seen a ghost.
For the fourth straight year, the Buckeyes left the field of play in utter shock and heartbreak against their arch rivals, the Michigan Wolverines. This year’s result stung worse than all others as the Buckeyes were heavy favorites against a lesser opponent and fell 13-10 in a frustrating outing that seemed like everything was working against them (including themselves as we’ll discuss more).
In the hours and days since the clock hit 00:00 in the stadium many in the college football world are talking and contemplating the tenure of head coach, Ryan Day. The extreme emotional response from many is that he should be fired. It had been brewing the last few years, losing three in a row to the Wolverines sent many over the edge. Four in a row is the unforgivable sin for most in the passionate fan base.
In the six years coach Day has been leading the football program at Ohio State he has said all the right things. All the things he MUST say to fulfill the politician component of his job description. Day must say that “The Game” means everything. He must say that beating “The Team Up North” is all he thinks about. He must communicate via press conferences and speaking engagements that he understands the assignment.
Beat Michigan. Win the Big Ten. Win a National Championship.
Unfortunately he’s now 1-4 against Michigan. Will not compete for a Big Ten Championship for the fourth year in a row. And he’s never won a national championship.
Simultaneously the Buckeyes are 66-10 in his tenure at Ohio State. He has maintained and contributed to a recruiting machine that routinely lands Ohio State in the top of the recruiting rankings and continues to bring elite talent to Columbus to play.
Ryan Day’s record against Michigan 1-4
Ryan Day’s record against everyone else 65-6
From a leadership standpoint, we’re not here to determine if Coach Day should be fired or make a case for him to stay. To be honest I tip my cap to all these coaches “in the arena” pursuing excellence in environments and games where the margin of victory is so thin. What I’m most intrigued by is the growing sentiment that there is a “mental block” for Coach Day and the Buckeyes when it comes to facing Michigan.
This year especially it seems to be the case. Michigan’s roster is far from the talent level that Ohio State has accumulated. Coming into the season, all eyes have been on the elite talent the Buckeyes possess. Coach Urban Meyer, the last coach to win a national championship at Ohio State had this to say about the Buckeye roster this summer, “I’ve read about them. I’ve watched them. This might be the best roster in college football in the last decade.”
Jim Tressel, another National Championship winning former Buckeye head coach had this to say alongside Coach Meyer, “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that many great players in the building all at once. Every position, every place you turn, Ryan (Day) has done a great job. Ohio State has done a great job.”
An All Too Common Experience
So what is happening when what might be the most talented roster assembled in the last 20 years plays so far beneath their potential in a game against a far inferior opponent? What is happening when the talent and capabilities of an elite performer get traded for rigidity, tightness, conservative, cautious actions?
It’s an all too common experience in sports and high performance. It’s the basketball player who hits all the shots in practice but when the lights of game time come on they miss. The golfer who strikes the ball perfectly at the driving range, but on the course it’s an entirely different story. The pitcher who can throw strikes in the bullpen or against a lesser team, but can’t find the strike zone when it matters most. Excelling in the safe confines of a lesser stakes environment, but when the stakes rise, the body and mind tenses up, shifting the elite to less than their capabilities.
It’s an unfortunate high performance sports experience that many have experienced. No warrior wants to spend their whole life shooting arrows at practice targets. We want to be at our best in the biggest moments. What prohibits all high performers from doing that? Their mindset. And most importantly, their mindset while in their respective competition arena.
I’ve spent the last 15 years studying the field of Sports Psychology and any high performance mental coach will tell you that the supreme goal (and hope) is that when the lights are the brightest, an athlete will be able to perform at their best. The hope is the athlete can and will enter a “flow state” where their subconscious mind takes over, their body defaults to the hours of intentional practice and training and they execute in the fashion they know they are capable of.
The best athletes and coaches have found a way to be at or near a flow state in the biggest moments. Kobe Bryant was known for this, Derek Jeter, Tom Brady. All of the greats displayed this in their careers.
But how does an emerging high performer get in this state? What is the opposite of this state and how do we fall into the opposite? The opposite of a flow state would be a freeze state. It’s when the conscious mind interferes and overrides the mind-body connection. It is “overthinking” it. In a lot of ways, Ohio State under Ryan Day has found themselves in a freeze state in the biggest moments against Michigan the last four years. Without question they appeared to be in a freeze state in this 2024 matchup.
As Ryan Day left the field, obviously crushed, and hurt by the result he made his way to the podium to address the media. I cannot imagine the level of dread walking to that podium to answer questions and talk about what he and his team spent a whole year trying to avoid. In the many soundbites of the post game press conference I want to draw your attention to one soundbite that may be the paradoxical answer to “the Michigan problem” for Ryan Day and the Ohio State Buckeyes. When asked about the disappointment and frustration of losing to Michigan again for the fourth year in a row here is what Coach Day had to say.
“Everybody wants to win this game in the worst way. Nobody wants to win it more than we do. It’s our number one goal every year.”
There are four words sandwiched in Coach Day’s response that reveal a performance mindset problem and may be a contributing factor in why Day’s Ohio State Buckeyes have been rolling for years in many big games and stumbling in games against Michigan where careers are defined.
In the worst way.
“Everybody wants to win this game in the worst way.”
It begs the question, what is the “Worst way” to want to win? Is it possible that there are different ways to want to win? And some of the want to win can be productive and some of the other ways to want to win can actually be counterproductive?
I’m going to give my best definition for what I believe is the “worst way” to want to win from years of personal experience as a college athlete and coach, and many years coaching mindset and mental performance with elite athletes. But first, we must understand more about what is happening internally in a competitive arena.
Yerkes-Dodson Law
In 1908 psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson developed the Yerkes-Dodson curve or the inverted U theory. The theory has formed the fundamentals and backbone of sports psychology and high performance mindset training for well over 100 years.
To better understand not only the athletes we’re watching on tv but perhaps your own child’s athletic performance, or your performance in board meetings or key sales presentations we must put the Inverted U Theory in our back pocket.
Yerkes-Dodson Law (it’s not a law, but rather a theory) positions our “arousal” or intensity on a scale from low to high. It’s really important to understand that this arousal level is not just external but more importantly it’s internal. A high performer can look calm on the outside, but internally they may be a wreck. Their head is spinning, their thinking of all kinds of intrusive thoughts about failure or who’s in the stands, or how their pregame warm up routine didn’t go perfect. Arousal or stress is always being registered internally and flows externally through our body. Signs of this may include a dry mouth, sweaty palms, tingling sensation in our finger tips, tight and tense muscles in the body.
Yerkes and Dodson placed performance on a Y-axis ranging from weak to strong. Weak performance would be characterized as failing to execute the mechanics of the sport. Not performing at your best. Not adjusting strategy according to feedback the game gives. Think bogeys and shanks in golf.
Strong performance could be characterized as pure execution. Doing all the things that generally lead to positive results.
What is most important for us to understand about Yerkes-Dodson Law is that there are essentially three zones performers can land in. Lethargic, “asleep”, lacking attention or intensity. Maybe you can recall an old coach yelling that you and your teammates need to “wake up.” This experience would be on the far left of the inverted U.
The second zone is the optimal zone for high performance. In the Human Functioning Curve we often reference at STC this would be the equivalent of “creative calm.” Optimal intensity, matching the task at hand. Pure and complete focus. The conditions that best lead to being in a flow state.
The third zone is on the far right of the inverted U bell curve. And this is the zone I want to draw our attention to when considering what happened in the 2024 matchup between Ohio State and Michigan. The far right zone of the bell curve is overaroused. It is when we are overcooked mentally, and emotionally. We are overly anxious and it leads to poor execution and performance.
Years ago when I was coaching baseball I had a pitcher who was supposed to start the second game of a doubleheader. It’s common for the pitcher who starts game two of a doubleheader to begin prepping their body toward the 6th or 7th inning of the first game. As the pitcher was prepping during the first game, the game was tied late in the 9th and ended up going extra innings. In total, game one went 14 innings! The pitcher of game two was stuck in a ramped up internal state for another 3.5 hours. Needless to say by the time he toed the rubber to start game two he was fried and his performance showed it. His overarousal caused his performance to diminish.
An athlete or high performers’ performance state can be influenced by all kinds of factors. Their sleep and recovery, their personality, their life circumstances and stress outside of their sport, and of course their relationship with pressure. We’ve discussed pressure many times in 2024 through our STC podcast and articles, but as we look at Ryan Day and the Ohio State Buckeyes we want to explore another key performance term around pressure called ‘Cognitive Appraisal.’
“The Worst Way”
Cognitive appraisal has many layers with both a primary and secondary, and a reappraisal process that is worth a more detailed look (Shoot me an email and I can direct you to some resources), but ultimately cognitive appraisal for a high performer is a real time evaluation of an event and its impact on our well-being. Events become categorized into our mind, with more stressful and meaningful events triggering more processing. Our "antennas" go up. Our innate sense of interpreting threats goes online and we begin to respond mentally (and physically). We then begin to assess our ability to cope with the stressor or experience. “Are we prepared for this?” It generates an emotional response.
In short, appraisal is our hardwired ability to assess the stakes. We assign intense meaning to events and if you have watched or participated in sports you can quickly see how this appraisal process can impact our performance.
Imagine if I laid a 5 ft wide board on the flat ground in your kitchen (not raised, merely flat on the ground). If I asked you if you thought you could walk across the 5 ft wide board without falling off onto your kitchen floor you would probably scoff, “Of course!”
Now how would your response change if we raised the 5 ft wide board and placed it between the Morrill and Lincoln Towers on the campus of Ohio State, 260 ft above the ground? Not so sure anymore, are you? What changed, it’s still the same 5 ft wide board you felt you could confidently walk across? What changed was the stakes and your interpretation of what would happen if you slipped.
When the board is just on your kitchen floor the slipping doesn’t really do much harm. 260 feet in the air, the slipping is fatal.
This brings us back to the quote from Coach Ryan Day’s postgame press conference.
“Everybody wants to win this game in the worst way. Nobody wants to win it more than we do. It’s our number one goal every year.”
“In the worst way.”
What is the worst way to want to win?
The worst way to want to win is when our desire to win begins to interfere with our ability to execute on the actions and behaviors that actually lead to winning.
It’s when our desire for the outcome robs our attention from the task at hand.
We can want it too much - in the worst way. The tightness from coaches and athletes we saw with Ohio State resembled a collective group that wanted to avoid slipping more than a group playing fearless, free and poised. It was a group playing to “get a monkey off their back,” or “send a message of toughness” or to right some past wrongs.
It’s obvious they “wanted it.” But what value is the want when it’s time to focus on execution.
A question consistently posed across all levels of athletics by coaches and parents is “How bad do you want it?” Often by coaches toward athletes. Often asked in the context of the pain and suffering of training. It’s a question used by coaches and leaders to motivate. It’s meant to offer a high performer a moment to reflect. To contextualize their current suffering in the backdrop of what they are chasing. A moment to help bring purpose to pain and nudge a high performer to maintain their effort and go a little deeper for more.
For many, the want is the basis for purpose. Wanting is the expression of our desires. The degree of want will determine the degree of sacrifice and suffering. When it comes to high performance, leadership, and flourishing a common critique for struggling performers is
“You don’t want it bad enough.”
You didn’t want it enough to make the necessary sacrifices required to attain it. You didn’t pay the price of admission. You didn’t do the training. You’re merely interested, but not committed.
Your measurement of want is too low for the accomplishment you are interested in.
The standard rule of thumb is,
If you raise your degree of want to match the goal and you will make progress.
But the more I study high performance and flourishing leaders, the small percentage of the population who live fully committed, the rules for engagement become inverse.
For the small percentage of the population who DO truly want it badly, a different internal experience must take place. At the moment of impact, they must release the want and turn their entire attention to the task at hand. In the arena of high performance the question of “how bad do you want it?” is utterly irrelevant. In fact, it will prohibit you from getting the things you want. It makes for a great scene in a disney movie but for the performance mindset necessary to perform at a high level it is a kryptonite question. Why? Because it overly arouses our mind-body connection. It disrupts everything we’re trying to get to in big moments. It tightens and narrows our focus on a distorted appraisal of meaning. It whispers to our deepest fears and insecurities and reminds us “If you fail in this moment, you’ll lose everything.”
“Everything you have worked for will be wasted if you fail right now.”
And as we are tempted with these fantastic lies, our mind flees the present moment and our thoughts flash forward to the terrible feeling of what it will be like if we lose. What will it be like if we are embarrassed. How horrible it will feel to face the reality of failure.
Struggling to return to the present moment we fail to realize our body has now tightened and we carry extra anxiousness around these thoughts. Our mind cannot tell reality from fiction so our body responds to the images we just witnessed around failure. Tightening. Tense. Conservative.
The exact opposite of flow, playing free and loose, confident and poised.
The Paradox of High Performance
So how can a coach and leader like Ryan Day facing real pressure to perform, right the ship and get the monkey off their back? For some, they actually may need to let go. How scary is that?
“So you’re telling me with all this pressure, your advice is to care less?”
Yes.
If you consistently find yourself overwhelmed, overaroused, tight, tense and underperforming you may need to let go.
It’s the paradox of high performance.
The moment of highest importance is likely the exact moment you must surrender the outcome.
You might actually want the thing too much. You’re failing to recognize you are suffocating it. Getting in your own way.
It is possible to be your own greatest threat to your best performance. It’s often not the boogeyman “over there” we need to be worried about. It’s the enemy from within - ourselves when we are in a fight or flight state as we interpret our reality.
Everybody wants to win. Is your want to win, helping you or hurting you?
Stay The Course,
