Super Bowl 2011: Why Aaron Rodgers Being Hot Had Nothing to Do with Him Winning

Leading up to the Super Bowl, you heard several people talk about how hot the Green Bay Packers were, more specifically how hot Aaron Rodgers was.

During the Super Bowl Joe Buck and Troy Aikman kept talking about the momentum shifts in the game—from the late touchdown in the first half by the Steelers to go into the locker room to the fumble late in the game by the Steelers' Rashard Mendenhall.

The problem with all of this is that it’s not true.

That’s right—being hot and having momentum is a myth.

If you ask any athlete, they’ll tell you sometimes the rim or the lanes or whatever seems bigger or more open than usual.

If every athlete will attest to this feeling when they are “feeling it,” why is it a myth? Troy Aikman, three-time Super Bowl winner, would know if momentum is an actual fact of playing sports.

So why is it a myth?

Because our brains are flawed.

Our minds are made to pick up patterns. This is done for safety reasons so that if something out of the ordinary happens, it sticks out like a clown at an emo party. Think about the last time you were driving somewhere and you thought, “Something isn’t right here, ” and it turned out you were lost. It’s because something didn’t follow the pattern.

When it comes to sports, it’s an unnatural event. Our minds are made to create patterns to discern an issue when something doesn’t follow that pattern. In sports, it’s random.

Now better players give you better odds at making a shot or making a pass, but each event is still random. Each event is independent of each other.

The book How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer talks about a study done on basketball players and whether or not players can actually have a “hot hand.”

What did it find? “There was absolutely no evidence of the hot hand. A player’s chance of making a shot was not affected by whether or not his previous shots had gone in.” It found from one particular player that after making three shots in a role, a sure sign of having that hot hand, on average his field goal percentage dropped from 46 percent to 34 percent.

Researchers also looked at free-throw percentages and whether or not there was a hot hand in that. What did they find? “After he made several free throws in a row, his free-throw percentage actually declined.”

That player shooting the free throws was Larry Bird.

Same thing happens with gambling, with the stock market and with any other random event. Our minds have to follow a pattern. When there is no pattern, our minds can’t handle that concept and therefore make up one.

Each shot, each pass is its own random event affected only by the player involved. What that player has done in the past has nothing to do with what he is doing in the present.

Bird shooting free throws is like him rolling a weighted 10-sided die. Nine of the sides are weighted so that the odds are favored for him to roll a number that lets him make a free throw. Shaquille O'Neal's die, however, only has about five sides weighted.

You are going to disagree with me, but believe me, it’s only because our brains can’t handle this fact.