Fighting through negativity bias and a wide receiver's drop issues
By: Matt Harmon
February 13th, 2016
February 13th, 2016
Brandon Marshall has a long history of drop issues but that should not be the first point in his evaluation (Image: nj.com)
In case you didn't know, I spend just a little bit of my time watching wide receivers. The anecdotal and overly simplistic way with which the media and observers analyze the position drove me to create the Reception Perception methodology. Without a doubt the most egregious of these is when someone starts the evaluation of a wide receiver with their drop issues.
“Well, it’s pretty important for a wide receiver to catch the football.” “He just drops too many passes.” “He can’t catch.” I’d rather you scrape all your nails over a whole school’s worth of chalkboards than hear one of those phrases be your leading point in a debate about a wide receiver’s merit.
My Footballguys colleague, mentor and close friend Matt Waldman recently let me rant on this subject at the beginning of our RSP Film Room episode studying Cal’s Kenny Lawler. However, on Thursday night a Twitter discussion between USA Today’s Senior NFL Draft Analyst, Jon Ledyard (a hard worker and well worth a follow), and myself regarding Southern Mississippi wideout prospect Michael Thomas’ exclusion from the NFL Scouting Combine saw me divulge a bit deeper into my thinking on drops.
As I told Ledyard, my theory on drops actually organically and originally stemmed more from my educational background as a sociology student, and from meditating on my personal life. My emphasis in the sociological realm, one which I intended to go for a PhD in before the passion as a writer took over and the reveal of that destiny, was studying how individuals interacted in society. Oddly enough, in my own opinion, it’s that background that brings me a unique perspective and process as a football analyst. In reality, my process between the two is not too different at all. With my current line of work, the interaction is the individual matches and performances in football, and the society is the field during the games.
One theory from my time in education that applies directly to this drops fallacy is negativity bias.
As psychologist Jonathan Haidt expressed in the New York Times, “the mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly and persistently than to equivalent good things.” Your brain is naturally wired to overreact to a negative event than a positive influence infiltrating your life.
“The Social Construction of Reality” by Peter Berger is one of the true pillars of the social theorist falling under the Symbolic Interactionism tree, as I did. My undergraduate advisor and mentor, Dr. Chip Walton, always hammered into us at the onset of any course he taught that the main takeaway was, “reality is socially constructed but privately experienced.” Indeed, the community around us, and our primary social constructs work to shape our perception of the world, and that perception often becomes our reality.
No matter your perception, negativity bias is often the individual’s greatest combatant in perceiving reality in a pleasing way. At different prior periods of my life, my own negativity bias was crippling. I would cling to, emphasize and harbor negative feelings and reactions to life events like it was sustenance needed to survive. I didn't just have a negativity bias, I soaked it in like a sponge. During my lowest point in life, a depressive episode in the year following my college graduation (2013 for those counting at home), I almost lost myself to that. I’m not comfortable yet, at least in this space, to share the details of that moment of my history, but I hope to someday. Let’s just leave it with this: in the morning I would rise to sadness, and the times where I would sleep, I went to bed drowning myself in it.
Fighting through those feelings is accomplished in part by the reprogramming of your own mind. Constantly exposing yourself to positivity and reminders of the goodness of the world you live in. More importantly, rediscovering your own worth. Again, there’s a longer story to tell, but that’s not what you or I are here for at the moment. The point to take away is that when I finally won that battle, I was a new person with a different perspective. It saved my life before, and I’m going to live the rest of that life with a focus on positivity. Emphasizing one rejection or disappointment isn't what I do anymore. In the years following that period, my focus is on the good in myself, the people in my life and the world around me. Not ignoring the negative, that’s just as dangerous, but properly weighing it against the, what is almost always, overwhelmingly higher percentage of positives in the story.
When reflecting and meditating back on the change in philosophy, it’s clear the effect influences my evaluation process when it comes to football players. Of course, there’s no greater representation of this than my thoughts and approach to the position I chose to work on the most.
When you’re watching a wide receiver, especially if it’s one on your favorite team in a live game on Sunday but even if you’re scouting them on film at a later date, and they drop a pass your brain has an automatic visceral reaction. The disappointment of the moment sticks with you, and their failure in execution of that one part of a single play hits you hard. That’s your negativity bias kicking in. Your brain wants you to weigh that drop in your final evaluation heavier than the other catches, yards, perhaps touchdowns and successfully run routes in that game. Even over the course of a season or a career, your negativity bias wants you to keep focusing on the visceral reaction drops cause.
From a pure numbers standpoint, it’s almost insane. Amari Cooper led the NFL in drops in 2015 with 18, per Pro Football Focus. The Raiders attempted 606 passes as a team last year, and Cooper played over 85 percent of the team’s snaps while running 592 pass routes. Focusing in on Cooper’s drops seems foolish when you realize they occurred on just 3.04 percent of his routes. If you’re at all familiar with his game, you know Cooper is freakishly polished as a route-runner for someone his age (still just 21.241 years old), and creates easy smooth separation. Where is the wisdom in making his drop issues the first talking point in his game when they come on such a small sample of his routes? Cooper’s 18 drops were drastic, but you can take this thought to other players, as well.
Brandon Marshall is one of the best examples. The Pro Bowl receiver dropped 47 passes over the last four years, per Pro Football Focus, and led the NFL in the stat for the 2013 season. During that same time frame, Marshall racked up 388 catches for 5,026 yards and 45 touchdowns. Marshall has legitimate drop issues, but doesn't it look silly to make that a major talking point in his game when compared to the good he brings to the table? No one can seriously make an argument that his drops are anywhere near as important as how he transformed the Jets passing game this season.
Of course, Brandon Marshall is one of the best receivers in the game, and has been for quite some time. Yet, this is a mindset we should hold for all NFL receivers and draft prospects.
Much in the same way I combat negativity bias in my personal life, focusing on properly weighing the good that outnumbers the bad, I am far more concerned with what a wide receiver “can do” than what he “can’t do”. Rather than making a wideout’s drop issues the first point in his scouting report, I’d rather work to identify if he has a trump card or not. My thoughts on trump cards in relation to the position are probably best explained in Devin Smith’s Reception Perception from last draft season. In relation to drops, I want to know if the receiver has qualities and aspects of their game that make the drops negligible. If they bring something to the table that make the drops easy to live with, I don’t really see the reason to care if they drop a pass on a small percentage of their routes.
My two favorite examples of this in the league right now are Kelvin Benjamin and Martavis Bryant. Both players constantly get the “drops too many passes” label. However, both players bring more than enough value, both in their play and tactically to their team, to make those negative plays worth living through. Benjamin makes plays no one on the 2015 Carolina roster could make with his elite size and my ball mentality. The Panthers sorely missed that ability at the catch point in the Super Bowl. No one should need reminding of the positive force Martavis Bryant has on the Steelers offense.The breath-taking plays he makes on the deep ball and after the catch are far more important in his evaluation than his “drop issues”. Honestly, no player better exemplifies the trump card theory and embracing variance than Martavis Bryant. If you think I’m just overcorrecting with some sort of “positivity bias” on Bryant, just watch his performance again Denver in the playoffs. He proved in that game he can function as a team’s top option if need be.
Inevitably, someone will bring the extreme examples of players with drop issues, like Greg Little and Darius Hayward-Bey, into this discussion. Those players struggle mightily with drops, but that is not the reason they did not live up their potential. Little, quite frankly, didn’t do anything well as a wide receiver. Heyward-Bey has some nice raw measurables, but plays the position stiff as a board which negates the physical advantage he should have. Even Davante Adams, who now gets lumped into this group by some, has far bigger issues. Adams failed this year because he could not separate from man coverage, and ran poor routes, not because he dropped 10 measly passes. He can turn his career around, but it doesn't start with eliminating drops. If any one of those three players offered trump cards or executed in other phases of the game like Cooper, Benjamin or Bryant, they’d have bigger roles and a higher status than they currently do. As Adam Harstad says, it’s overemphasizing what you see and ignoring what we don’t. Adam’s article and how it relates to Psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s theory “What You See Is All There Is”, is well worth your time. It’s in direct relation to why I do the work I do with Reception Perception, and my thoughts on drops. We have a bias towards believing players like Little and Heyward-Bey failed because we see it happen during the games, while we don't see their poor execution as route-runners and their failure to earn separation consistently.
You have players like Amari Cooper, Brandon Marshall, Kelvin Benjamin and Martavis Bryant on your team if you want to win games. You let negativity bias take over and hammer on their “drop issues” if you want to miss the forest for the trees. Future, and should be should already be nominated, Hall of Famer Terrell Owens dropped passes on as much of a regular basis. Here years after his career, we don't remember those moments. The visceral reaction has faded, and with perspective we can look back and properly weigh those moments with the overwhelming amount of good he brought as one of the, at worst, five best receivers to ever play the game.
Frankly, if we approached other aspects of life with the same negativity bias we do wide receivers’ drop issues, we’d miss out on a ton. If you have a bad waiter at your favorite restaurant on 3.04 percent of your visits there, you don’t stop going. You’re willing to take the good with the bad. You might not like every program a particular television network airs, but that doesn't mean you need to stop watching the network entirely. Danny Tuccitto of the Three Cone Drill podcast shared another terrific example:
“Well, it’s pretty important for a wide receiver to catch the football.” “He just drops too many passes.” “He can’t catch.” I’d rather you scrape all your nails over a whole school’s worth of chalkboards than hear one of those phrases be your leading point in a debate about a wide receiver’s merit.
My Footballguys colleague, mentor and close friend Matt Waldman recently let me rant on this subject at the beginning of our RSP Film Room episode studying Cal’s Kenny Lawler. However, on Thursday night a Twitter discussion between USA Today’s Senior NFL Draft Analyst, Jon Ledyard (a hard worker and well worth a follow), and myself regarding Southern Mississippi wideout prospect Michael Thomas’ exclusion from the NFL Scouting Combine saw me divulge a bit deeper into my thinking on drops.
As I told Ledyard, my theory on drops actually organically and originally stemmed more from my educational background as a sociology student, and from meditating on my personal life. My emphasis in the sociological realm, one which I intended to go for a PhD in before the passion as a writer took over and the reveal of that destiny, was studying how individuals interacted in society. Oddly enough, in my own opinion, it’s that background that brings me a unique perspective and process as a football analyst. In reality, my process between the two is not too different at all. With my current line of work, the interaction is the individual matches and performances in football, and the society is the field during the games.
One theory from my time in education that applies directly to this drops fallacy is negativity bias.
As psychologist Jonathan Haidt expressed in the New York Times, “the mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly and persistently than to equivalent good things.” Your brain is naturally wired to overreact to a negative event than a positive influence infiltrating your life.
“The Social Construction of Reality” by Peter Berger is one of the true pillars of the social theorist falling under the Symbolic Interactionism tree, as I did. My undergraduate advisor and mentor, Dr. Chip Walton, always hammered into us at the onset of any course he taught that the main takeaway was, “reality is socially constructed but privately experienced.” Indeed, the community around us, and our primary social constructs work to shape our perception of the world, and that perception often becomes our reality.
No matter your perception, negativity bias is often the individual’s greatest combatant in perceiving reality in a pleasing way. At different prior periods of my life, my own negativity bias was crippling. I would cling to, emphasize and harbor negative feelings and reactions to life events like it was sustenance needed to survive. I didn't just have a negativity bias, I soaked it in like a sponge. During my lowest point in life, a depressive episode in the year following my college graduation (2013 for those counting at home), I almost lost myself to that. I’m not comfortable yet, at least in this space, to share the details of that moment of my history, but I hope to someday. Let’s just leave it with this: in the morning I would rise to sadness, and the times where I would sleep, I went to bed drowning myself in it.
Fighting through those feelings is accomplished in part by the reprogramming of your own mind. Constantly exposing yourself to positivity and reminders of the goodness of the world you live in. More importantly, rediscovering your own worth. Again, there’s a longer story to tell, but that’s not what you or I are here for at the moment. The point to take away is that when I finally won that battle, I was a new person with a different perspective. It saved my life before, and I’m going to live the rest of that life with a focus on positivity. Emphasizing one rejection or disappointment isn't what I do anymore. In the years following that period, my focus is on the good in myself, the people in my life and the world around me. Not ignoring the negative, that’s just as dangerous, but properly weighing it against the, what is almost always, overwhelmingly higher percentage of positives in the story.
When reflecting and meditating back on the change in philosophy, it’s clear the effect influences my evaluation process when it comes to football players. Of course, there’s no greater representation of this than my thoughts and approach to the position I chose to work on the most.
When you’re watching a wide receiver, especially if it’s one on your favorite team in a live game on Sunday but even if you’re scouting them on film at a later date, and they drop a pass your brain has an automatic visceral reaction. The disappointment of the moment sticks with you, and their failure in execution of that one part of a single play hits you hard. That’s your negativity bias kicking in. Your brain wants you to weigh that drop in your final evaluation heavier than the other catches, yards, perhaps touchdowns and successfully run routes in that game. Even over the course of a season or a career, your negativity bias wants you to keep focusing on the visceral reaction drops cause.
From a pure numbers standpoint, it’s almost insane. Amari Cooper led the NFL in drops in 2015 with 18, per Pro Football Focus. The Raiders attempted 606 passes as a team last year, and Cooper played over 85 percent of the team’s snaps while running 592 pass routes. Focusing in on Cooper’s drops seems foolish when you realize they occurred on just 3.04 percent of his routes. If you’re at all familiar with his game, you know Cooper is freakishly polished as a route-runner for someone his age (still just 21.241 years old), and creates easy smooth separation. Where is the wisdom in making his drop issues the first talking point in his game when they come on such a small sample of his routes? Cooper’s 18 drops were drastic, but you can take this thought to other players, as well.
Brandon Marshall is one of the best examples. The Pro Bowl receiver dropped 47 passes over the last four years, per Pro Football Focus, and led the NFL in the stat for the 2013 season. During that same time frame, Marshall racked up 388 catches for 5,026 yards and 45 touchdowns. Marshall has legitimate drop issues, but doesn't it look silly to make that a major talking point in his game when compared to the good he brings to the table? No one can seriously make an argument that his drops are anywhere near as important as how he transformed the Jets passing game this season.
Of course, Brandon Marshall is one of the best receivers in the game, and has been for quite some time. Yet, this is a mindset we should hold for all NFL receivers and draft prospects.
Much in the same way I combat negativity bias in my personal life, focusing on properly weighing the good that outnumbers the bad, I am far more concerned with what a wide receiver “can do” than what he “can’t do”. Rather than making a wideout’s drop issues the first point in his scouting report, I’d rather work to identify if he has a trump card or not. My thoughts on trump cards in relation to the position are probably best explained in Devin Smith’s Reception Perception from last draft season. In relation to drops, I want to know if the receiver has qualities and aspects of their game that make the drops negligible. If they bring something to the table that make the drops easy to live with, I don’t really see the reason to care if they drop a pass on a small percentage of their routes.
My two favorite examples of this in the league right now are Kelvin Benjamin and Martavis Bryant. Both players constantly get the “drops too many passes” label. However, both players bring more than enough value, both in their play and tactically to their team, to make those negative plays worth living through. Benjamin makes plays no one on the 2015 Carolina roster could make with his elite size and my ball mentality. The Panthers sorely missed that ability at the catch point in the Super Bowl. No one should need reminding of the positive force Martavis Bryant has on the Steelers offense.The breath-taking plays he makes on the deep ball and after the catch are far more important in his evaluation than his “drop issues”. Honestly, no player better exemplifies the trump card theory and embracing variance than Martavis Bryant. If you think I’m just overcorrecting with some sort of “positivity bias” on Bryant, just watch his performance again Denver in the playoffs. He proved in that game he can function as a team’s top option if need be.
Inevitably, someone will bring the extreme examples of players with drop issues, like Greg Little and Darius Hayward-Bey, into this discussion. Those players struggle mightily with drops, but that is not the reason they did not live up their potential. Little, quite frankly, didn’t do anything well as a wide receiver. Heyward-Bey has some nice raw measurables, but plays the position stiff as a board which negates the physical advantage he should have. Even Davante Adams, who now gets lumped into this group by some, has far bigger issues. Adams failed this year because he could not separate from man coverage, and ran poor routes, not because he dropped 10 measly passes. He can turn his career around, but it doesn't start with eliminating drops. If any one of those three players offered trump cards or executed in other phases of the game like Cooper, Benjamin or Bryant, they’d have bigger roles and a higher status than they currently do. As Adam Harstad says, it’s overemphasizing what you see and ignoring what we don’t. Adam’s article and how it relates to Psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s theory “What You See Is All There Is”, is well worth your time. It’s in direct relation to why I do the work I do with Reception Perception, and my thoughts on drops. We have a bias towards believing players like Little and Heyward-Bey failed because we see it happen during the games, while we don't see their poor execution as route-runners and their failure to earn separation consistently.
You have players like Amari Cooper, Brandon Marshall, Kelvin Benjamin and Martavis Bryant on your team if you want to win games. You let negativity bias take over and hammer on their “drop issues” if you want to miss the forest for the trees. Future, and should be should already be nominated, Hall of Famer Terrell Owens dropped passes on as much of a regular basis. Here years after his career, we don't remember those moments. The visceral reaction has faded, and with perspective we can look back and properly weigh those moments with the overwhelming amount of good he brought as one of the, at worst, five best receivers to ever play the game.
Frankly, if we approached other aspects of life with the same negativity bias we do wide receivers’ drop issues, we’d miss out on a ton. If you have a bad waiter at your favorite restaurant on 3.04 percent of your visits there, you don’t stop going. You’re willing to take the good with the bad. You might not like every program a particular television network airs, but that doesn't mean you need to stop watching the network entirely. Danny Tuccitto of the Three Cone Drill podcast shared another terrific example:
@MattHarmon_BYB you're being to conservative. it's more like giving up on a great dog because 1-of-50 shits is inside the house.
— Danny Tuccitto (@IR_DannyT) February 12, 2016
As the owner of a dog who seems to have a unique talent for throwing up in my bed at the most inopportune times, I can fully get behind that. If I wasn't willing to live with Charlie in the low moments, and embrace that variance, I’d be missing out on one of the more beautiful aspects of my life.
Having good hands is important, and of course you’d rather have a wide receiver without “drop issues” than one that does. However, all I ask is that we have a more nuanced approach to how we view them. When we’re looking at a wide receiver draft prospect this year, and he has some drops littered in his game, lets consider not having that as our first talking point. If he runs good routes, has a trump card or simply makes more plays than he doesn’t, we should weigh that more heavily than the handful of drops. You’re better at projecting a player to the NFL when looking at what he can do, rather than coming down with too heavy a hand on his drops.
Drop issues should never be the focal point of a wide receiver’s scouting report. There’s just too much else to the position. If the player proves to you he’s proficient enough in the other facets of the game, consider not caring about them at all. At this point in my career, drops are about the last thing I care about with the position.
We all have biases, whether socially or psychologically created. It’s an unavoidable aspect of being a human being. The important step to working around it is just recognizing we have them. Once you identify your negativity bias as a hinderance in properly evaluating a wide receiver with drop issues, you’ll have a better process in your evaluation. If you can apply it to your personal life too, let me be the first to tell you, it’s even more rewarding.
Having good hands is important, and of course you’d rather have a wide receiver without “drop issues” than one that does. However, all I ask is that we have a more nuanced approach to how we view them. When we’re looking at a wide receiver draft prospect this year, and he has some drops littered in his game, lets consider not having that as our first talking point. If he runs good routes, has a trump card or simply makes more plays than he doesn’t, we should weigh that more heavily than the handful of drops. You’re better at projecting a player to the NFL when looking at what he can do, rather than coming down with too heavy a hand on his drops.
Drop issues should never be the focal point of a wide receiver’s scouting report. There’s just too much else to the position. If the player proves to you he’s proficient enough in the other facets of the game, consider not caring about them at all. At this point in my career, drops are about the last thing I care about with the position.
We all have biases, whether socially or psychologically created. It’s an unavoidable aspect of being a human being. The important step to working around it is just recognizing we have them. Once you identify your negativity bias as a hinderance in properly evaluating a wide receiver with drop issues, you’ll have a better process in your evaluation. If you can apply it to your personal life too, let me be the first to tell you, it’s even more rewarding.
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