This Is Your Brain on College Football

David Wunderlich
Aug 26, 2017 · 2 min read

In Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow—which is a fascinating summary of how people make judgments and decisions—he talks about a psychological quirk he refers to as the possibility effect:

In the four examples below, your chances of winning $1 million go up by 5%. Is the news equally good in each case?

A. From 0% to 5%

B. From 5% to 10%

C. From 60% to 65%

D. From 95% to 100%

… Increasing the chances from 0 to 5% transforms the situation, creating a possibility that did not exist earlier, a hope of winning the prize. It is a qualitative change…

The large impact of 0 → 5% illustrates the possibility effect, which causes highly unlikely outcomes to be weighted disproportionately more than they “deserve”. People who buy lottery tickets in vast amounts show themselves to be willing to pay much more than expected value for very small chances to win a large prize.

This effect makes college football the magical sport that it is.

It consists of 18 to 22-year-olds playing a game with an irregularly shaped ball. Its violence removes players due to injury unpredictably. Weather can range from hot and humid to frozen and snowing to near-tropical storm levels of wind and rain, and the facts of when teams play each other and in what conditions is nearly always random.

Therefore, sometimes an FCS team beats №5. Sometimes a seemingly routine meeting of conference mates generates 135 points. Sometimes a freelancing freshman bests the most feared defense in the country.

These occurrences are why so many of us love the game. Each time these things happen, they delight us by redefining what is possible. We learn that probability of these events is no longer zero.

And then, of course, we start overbuying lottery tickets.

When a highly ranked team plays a good FCS team, we remind ourselves that App State beat Michigan. When two explosive offenses meet, we tell ourselves to keep an eye on it in case this is the time those two crazy mid-majors go for 60 points each. When Alabama meets any team with a mobile quarterback, we get our hopes up because of Johnny Manziel.

We are biologically hardwired to overrate these possibilities. We can’t help ourselves. The fact remains that top-ranked FBS teams basically never lose to FCS teams. That matchup between high powered offenses will probably end up yet another 40-something to 30-something game. That mobile quarterback will fail badly against the Crimson Tide if the rest of his team is more Mississippi State than Clemson.

And that’s okay. We breeze past those disappointments because there are so many teams playing so many games with so many variables at work that there is no end to the surprises to come. College football always pushes at the boundaries of what’s possible. Sometimes we don’t even know where we’ve set those boundaries until we see them breached.

College football will delight you, then disappoint you, then delight you again. May that cycle never end.

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David Wunderlich

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