Information Processing Speed

just something I made up. I’ve only seen it referred to as “ability to process information”, or words to that effect, but I thought if I wrote that ten times everybody might gag on it. Of course it’s only speculation, but I think it’s the mental equivalent to reflexes, so I guess you could also call it mental reaction time. I haven’t heard the term situational awareness but I recognize the attribute. I’ve always thought of it as the player who so loves the game, who’s so utterly commiited to it, who’s so completely, totally focussed while he’s playing, that he has an almost preternatural awareness. He knows not only where everybody is but also which way the ball will bounce, and is always at the right place at the right time. I think mental reaction time is difficult to differentiate from situational awareness but is more innate, that some players bump up against a limitation in their ability to process information fast. Practice helps us process information faster , as we get more familiar with situations, learn to recognize things, and develop appropriate automatic responses, just as driving a car gets easier with practice. But I’m suggesting that a person who has a lower ceiling is always relatively slower, everything else being equal, including experience and love of the game, and is therefore at a competitive disadvantage. And for the person whose ceiling is especially high, like Tom Brady perhaps, the game slows waaaay down with experience, and he therefore has a competitive advantage. In sum I think it interacts with but is separable from football smarts and situational awareness, which are also intangible and important qualities that separate great players from good ones. I’ve seen scouts explain that a quarterback is struggling because he can’t process information fast enough, and while the light eventually comes on (as they like to put it) for a Drew Brees, for a Joey Harrington it never does. (And he’s a really smart kid. I followed him all the way through college.) It seemed to me it wasn’t a “light” so much as a limit to his ability to think fast. I’m not surprised that coaches look for such subtleties when choosing players. I just wonder if they recognize and look for, assuming it exists, innate mental speed per se. I think I would have loved to play football for you, by the way.

Oh yes, I’d forgotten that. How interesting. Whether we draft him or not I think I’ll make a mental note to see how well he does just to satisfy my curiosity. Seeing as how these draft reports seem to disappear into the nethersphere after a year or less, maybe I should download a few of them for review a year or two from now, to see how well they called them.

I know this is veering off the subject, but…

Doom is one of the guys I first thought of (along with Marshall) when I read about Sundquist getting shown the door. That, along with the trades to get Champ and lose Lelie. I really wonder how much Ted had a hand in those moves. I’m sure he was in on all of it, but was he the major factor? What I’m getting at is what did the Broncos lose when he was ousted? I hope it wasn’t the player recognition stuff in the draft. It just seemed that right when Denver was stringing together a few good drafts, after a LONG dry spell, the GM gets tossed. That’s weird timing. Ideally, it was the last few years he had a little less influence in the draft, Shanny listening to a few more people, and as they started to pan out, it created more tension on Ted’s part and Shanny felt he was more and more expendable. Who knows? It’d be nice to be a fly on the wall at Broncos’ headquarters, though.

All young QBs make mistakes, especially when they start as a rookie. His mistakes were due to youth (meaning inexperience) and to misreading the field a bit. The one leads to the other. That’s what young QBs do. But he’s made visible progress. The game slowed down for him in his second year and will do even moreso in his third. When evaluating a young player, especially a QB, you always have to qualify it “for a rookie” or “for a second-year player.” And on that basis he’s done better than most of us dared hope. A 64% completion rate and a 20-14 touchdown/interception ratio is not just good “for a second-year QB”. It’s pretty darned good period. Unless he seriously backslides he’s on his way to being something special. Remember, Drew Brees wandered in the wilderness for three years until San Diego gave up on him and went after another franchise QB. Then suddenly, in his fourth year, he was able to react at game speed and became an elite player. Last year Cutler played every bit as well as I’d hoped, which is to say way better than I had any right to expect.

What I liked about the Broncos drafting Dumervil is they didn’t get hung up on measurables. When a guy gets 20 sacks there’s a reason, even if we can’t measure it. What that number suggested is that he just has a knack for getting to the QB. Sure, if he’d gotten 9 or 10 sacks his senior year that would’ve been good but it would have been reasonable to say, Well, he doesn’t have the physical attributes to do it against the big boys. But 20 sacks, and all those forced fumbles, too? And he’s still doing it.. The experts made it sound like there’s no way he could have gotten all those sacks. The Broncos focussed on the fact that he did. Now if, as is normally supposed to be the case, he makes his biggest jump the third year, that’s scary!

...but Styg should probably quit his day job and enter either the reasearch or practice fields of psych.

Wow! I mean, just wow! So let me get this straight. (mimics a Monty Python voice) “If three people walk onto the field, and three leave, Cutler is ok. But let’s say four people enter the field during a play. Does this mean he’s in trouble? I mean, really, does he get stuck in a tree or something?” : )

On a serious note, I’m beyond awed at the list of measurables of awareness by considering observed virtues. The concept is at once both poetic and intellectualy profound. I hope that didn’t sound like a line from Dieter on Sprokets (Michael Meyers / Saturday Night Live), because I am very honestly blown away at the idea. Wonderful comment!

I’m cognizant of the crows counting experiment and the magic number seven, as it’s known in psychological circles. Let’s call it perceptual strength. It didn’t occur to me until you brought it up, but I wonder if this capacity is a component of what hoosierteacher calls situational awareness, which refers to a player’s awareness of where everyone and everything is, what each player is likely to do, how the ball is going to bounce, etc. In that case a player with high PS might have a richer, more detailed perceptual field. PS, which is the total amount of information a player can hold in mind at one time, is related to IPS, but the latter is more specifically the rate at which a player can incorporate new information as a situation unfolds in the lightning fast bang bang bang of a football play. I see it as another component of situational awareness, the speed of mental as opposed to physical reflexes. I think the former is more important than the latter in an – ahem – information rich environment. The amount of information a player can hold and the speed at which he can update it are differentiable but complementary processes.

I like “concentration” a little bit better than “focus” because it has less of a connotation of “this is what I will pay attention to” and more a sense of bearing down and putting everything else out of mind, of locking in on the situation at hand. I’m trying to avoid the idea of it being a conscious, thinking-about sort of thing. The six items you list catch most of the intangibles coaches prize, but collectively have more to do with maturity than what I’m conceiving as IPS. Two or three of them do, however, seem relevant. Productivity is the bottom line, and by definition incorporates everything that contributes to performance and success. A player who is unusually productive despite less than glittering 40-yard, strength, or agility numbers probably has strong intangibles. We don’t have to know which ones to know, on the basis of his productivity, that he’s worth taking a chance on. Number five also seems relevant, although I’d call it judgment rather than justice to emphasize the sense of evaluation – setting priorities – over the idea of fair play. Finally, I would include pride if by that you mean something akin to degree of commitment, which I think has a lot to do with how much a player can develop these various intangible capacities we’ve been referring to. I think some of these capacities, especially IPS, are primarily a matter of genetic endowment, much like height, but just as good nutriition can enable us to reach our maximum potential, within the range that our genes allow, so, too, should there be ways to nurture and maximize IPS and other capabilities. Of course, everything else being equal, in terms of nurturing, the guy with faster mental reflexes will still be faster than the guy whose natural speed is slower, but everything need not be equal. A team that is especially good at this, and there may be ways to nurture these capacities that we’re not presently aware of, will have a competitive advantage. Sounds like an interesting area for research.

Thanks for your input. Very stimulating.