With the Olympics over and the NBA and NHL not yet into playoff mode, the NFL knows its fans need a shot of football in late winter. To prepare us (and the team general managers and coaches) for the NFL Draft in early May, 300 of the best college football players visited Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis last week for the annual NFL Scouting Combine.
While there are specific drills that the players go through for each position, it is the six workout drills, testing strength, agility, jumping and speed, that generate the most TV coverage and conversation. However, sport science researchers keep putting out study after study that shows that not only are the six tests redundant but that they also have little correlation to actual NFL performance, making them poor predictors for success
One of the most challenging and entertaining workout drills at this weekend’s NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis is the Gauntlet Drill for wide receivers and tight ends. Whether or not it relates to real NFL success is debated but it does provide a true test of hand-eye coordination and the ability to change focus while on the move. Obviously, being able to instantly pick up the flight of a thrown football is key for receivers but also is important for defensive backs who need to turn their heads at the last moment to find a pass. Now, vision researchers at Tübingen University in Germany have shown that humans actually use extremely small eye movements, called microsaccades, to achieve what’s more commonly known as peripheral vision.
In this NFL video, uber-analyst Mike Mayock provides a great overview of the Gauntlet Drill. Receivers run straight down a yard line while receiving a series of passes from alternating sides. The key is to change your focus quickly on the fly.
Here's Florida State's Rodney Smith completing the drill at the 2013 Combine.
As a player takes in the field with his vision, it appears to him as a smooth scan of the environment. In reality, humans make quick, darting glances, called saccades, at different targets. Its like our eyes see a movie shot at 3 frames a second while our brain perceives a scene at 30 frames per second.
In between these longer saccades are millisecond movements, microsaccades, that are believed to help the brain fill in missing information from the scene and prepare the eyes for an upcoming shift in focus.
"Microsaccades are sort of enigmatic," said Ziad Hafed, the leader of the Physiology of Active Vision Group. “They are movements of the eye which occur at exactly the moment when we are trying to look at something steadily -- i.e., when we are trying to prevent our eyes from moving.”
In the video link below (click to play), from his lab, you can see the microsaccades when the blue focus point changes from blue to red, while the test volunteer tries to keep their eyes fixed on the crosshair.
In describing how our vision and brain work together, Hafed used a soccer analogy. "Imagine that you are the coach of a (soccer) team," Hafed said. "You would normally ask your defenders to spread out across the field in order to provide good coverage during match play. However, in preparation for an upcoming corner kick by your opposing team, you would reorganize your defenders, assigning two of them to become temporary goalkeepers and protect the goal. What I found was evidence for a similar strategy in the visual brain before microsaccades.”
Late last year, Hafed’s research group found that microsaccades actually assist with peripheral vision or the perceived ability to look at two different things at once. He asked test volunteers to focus on a small cursor on a computer screen while he measured their eye movements with a camera pointed at their retinas. Then, he added another target off to the right or left of the cursor and measured the microsaccades that occurred immediately before the shift of focus, much like the driver’s vision test we take where we are asked if we see a blinking light on our right or left side of our vision field.
By analyzing the timing of the microsaccades with the correct answers of the volunteers, Hafed realized there was a purpose for these tiny eye movements to prep the brain for the next shift of focus.
Back to our football catching drill, when the receivers turn their head while running, their first focus may be on the quarterback but then the in-flight ball appears in the periphery and their next saccade is towards the ball. Athletic eyes that have been well trained by practice and vision drills will outperform those with less agile vision. While fast 40-yard dash times and soft hands are important to a receiver, their visual system performance should not be overlooked.
Check out the Axon Sports iPad app that players are training with at the Combine this year.
The Playmaker’s Decisions
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As the old saying goes, “you can’t coach height”, but, according to researchers at the University of South Australia, you can recruit and develop key skills beyond genetic gifts. That was their conclusion after interviewing 90 elite basketball coaches from around the world, including men and women from major college programs and professional teams from the NCAA, NBA, WNBA, and 10 other international leagues.
"Game statistics are commonly used to recruit basketball players but by watching players on the court, and how they behave outside of it, coaches can pick up a lot of non-physical factors that indicate whether a player is likely to make the grade,” said Michael Rogers, a PhD student in the university’s Allied Health and Human Performance program and lead author of the study.
With team training now resume for many leagues around the world, athletes are increasing their physical fitness levels back up to in-season form. Well-known data metrics, like heart rate, speed, and power, are being uploaded and summarized by performance trainers and scrutinized by coaches. But, mentally, where is the team at? Are they cognitively as sharp as they were two months ago? Are they thinking about family members or friends? How has this new pattern of living affected their brain?
Of course, team psychologists will have discussions with players, when needed, to address any concerns that they bring forward. Yet, it would benefit players and the team if there was a standardized framework for assessing their overall readiness to endure the battle on the field, in other words, their cognitive fitness. On top of physical capabilities, the variables of anticipation, awareness, perception and decision-making often determine the outcome of a game.
Because we all need one more reason to get off the couch and on the treadmill or the empty trail while we work from home, researchers at the University of California, Davis have found that the neurotransmitters in our brains actually switch into a hyper-learning mode after aerobic exercise.
n the 2019 College Football Playoff National Championship game, two true freshmen, quarterback Trevor Lawrence and wide receiver Justyn Ross, made a startling statement as they dominated the defending champion Alabama Crimson Tide. The Lawrence to Ross connection produced 6 catches for 153 yards, including a game-breaking 74-yard touchdown pass and a one-handed circus catch for a late, crucial first down. Two 19-year-olds, one 6 feet, 6 inches and the other 6’ 4”, outplayed one of the best defensive units in the country.
In our latest book, we featured the rise of Justyn Ross and his ironic results at Nike’s “The Opening” competition for high school football stars. Despite the speed and athleticism that Ross displayed in the national championship game, he has another, defining quality that doesn’t show up in the SPARQ ratings - he’s a Playmaker.
The double-edged sword of respect and expectation that comes with the number 10 jersey is reserved for the shoulders of a player that can handle the weight. So when Jürgen Klinsmann, former U.S. Men’s National Team head coach, handed it to seventeen-year-old Christian Pulisic before a 2016 World Cup qualifier game, he knew the load that was being placed on the young playmaker. “The No. 10 has a meaning,” Klinsmann said. “Ask him now how he feels with that heavy number on his back.”
That night, Pulisic responded brilliantly, scoring two goals and assisting on a third in just twenty-six minutes, making him the youngest U.S. player ever to score in a World Cup qualifier. Even Bruce Arena, who’s seen his share of promising prospects in his forty years of coaching at the college, pro, and national team levels, believes in Pulisic. “I think he is just a natural,” said Arena. “The game’s easy for him. He’s got exceptional skill, vision, he’s pretty smooth.” Wary of anointing him a savior too early, Arena did inch out on a limb when pressed: “It makes you think that this is going to be perhaps the first American superstar in the sport. You have to be hesitant about this but this is a very talented young man.”
For those baseball hitters who can do the former, the latter comes much easier. Seeing, identifying and selecting which pitch to swing at is a combination of visual perception, brain processing and motor skill execution. Sure, the physics of hitting a baseball, measured by things called launch angle and exit velocity, determine the trajectory and distance of a batted ball. But it’s that pre-contact decision making process that gets hitters on base so they can score runs and win games. Just as bat speed, leg drive and arm strength define the distance of a hit, the purely cognitive skills of perception, information processing and hand-eye coordination pick out the best pitch to hit and, more importantly, which pitch to avoid.
And when you’re 5 feet, 9 inches tall, you rely on those brain skills much more than physical dominance to stay up in the big leagues. That’s exactly what Mookie Betts, right fielder for the 2018 World Champion Boston Red Sox, has done over his young four-season career. Sure, he won the AL batting title this year with a .346 batting average, but he also had a league high slugging percentage, with 32 home runs and 80 RBIs.
Substituting brain for brawn, Betts excels in a category of baseball analytics known as plate discipline, in other words, picking the right pitch to swing at and then making contact with that swing. In the pre-swing decision-making process, hitters with good plate discipline swing at pitches in the strike zone, not out of it. When they do decide to swing, they make contact more often with better hand-eye coordination.
“I’ve done this a long time and I’ve never had a game like that. This is uncharted territory.” To be sure, it was one of Mason Crosby’s worse games of his 12-year NFL kicking career, missing four out of five field goals and an extra point. In his last five full seasons, the Green Bay Packers kicker has made an average of 85% of his field goals, so his week 5 game, a 31-23 loss to the Detroit Lions, was more than a statistical anomaly. Missing wide from 42, 41, 38 and 56 yards, Crosby was at a loss to explain his sudden inaccuracy, “Every attempt I felt like I was in rhythm going through it,” said Crosby. “It was one of those days that just wasn’t there. I’ve done this a long time, and I’ve never had a day where it wasn’t there like that.”
These pre-game preparations are certainly important for warming up the arms and legs, getting the heart rate up and loosening up muscles. But maybe more importantly, this skill repetition also gets the brain ready for the hundreds of actions it will need to perform soon after.
