Sports Ethics: Focus on What you can Control—Yourself

Marcus Smart, an Oklahoma State All American was just suspended for three days after hitting fan who yelled an expletive at him in a game. His suspension will hurt his team badly and highlights an ever-present challenge in athletics and life--individuals have to focus upon what they can control-themselves. When they move beyond it like Marcus, they damage themselves and their team. Smart gets it in acknowledge his harm to his teammates and fans and does not duck the issue, “It’s something I’ll have to learn from, a lesson I’ll have to learn from. The consequences that are coming with it — I’m taking full responsibility. No fingers pointing — this is all upon me.”

Every competition produces a stream of stress, mistakes, accidents, and intentional and unintentional impacts, bad referee calls. The chaotic complexity of competition creates bad luck, good luck, and unanticipated and pathological consequences for even perfectly executed perfect execution. These endless challenges pound on the psychological integrity of athletes and professionals and make self-conscious self-mastery the ethical foundation of achievement.

Every young and old athlete has heard it from coaches and players a thousand times—focus on what you can control—yourself.

The moral bedlam of competition can lead athletes and professionals to become confused, angry, frustrated even lost. The confusion of competition can invite explosions and erratic behavior and deformed judgment all of which hurt the person and the person’s team. Good and successful professionals drive themselves to master skills and execute under pressure. This success depends upon developing self-mastery to control oneself. Good athletes and professionals cultivate a zone of control that integrates emotions, perception, mind, attitudes, body and intent.

Every successful athletes and professional faces this constant exhortation—control what you can control—yourself. It is the foundation upon which all other skills and the ability to succeed under stress and competition depend. It is also one of the hardest lessons for people to master; it also anchors personal responsibility of the athlete and professional.

The zone of control depends upon the athlete’s ability to master internal psychological control. Persons can educate their emotions. They can train themselves what to be angry about and what to ignore. They can channel intruding emotions into other actions or offset erupting emotions with prepared and integrated programs of integrated memory, emotions, perceptions and intention that enable them to counter program anger or frustration. Losing it is not preordained but a failure of internal self-mastery.

This means developing a form of full-bodied wisdom that lead the ancient Greeks to value sports so highly. One’s emotions become a form of pattern recognition that instantaneously recognize the rightness or wrongness of actions. They provide internal armor against loss of control and weakness of will by supporting disciplined intentional action under conditions that the emotional augments perception sees as appropriate. This pattern recognition embodies not just the knowledge of trained athletes and professionals but also the amalgamation of emotion and cognition.

This form of embodied wisdom and training takes time and effort. It requires constant self-effort by the young athlete encouraged by coaches and fellow teammates. Players working with coaches and fellow players can educate their emotions and train themselves about what to be angry about and how to channel that anger rather than either get angry over things they cannot control or let the anger control them and drive them to irrational or hurtful actions.

This self-mastery remains the key to building physical and emotional resilience in action. This resilience enables players to face failure and bad luck and intentional goading but rebound and continue forward. 

The emphasis upon controlling what you can control can focus inward--players cultivate their own deep values. A player can grow into a deeper commitment to their team and to winning and enduring rather than expressing their own individuality or paying back an slight. Self-control involves growing into an awareness of deep and abiding values and buttressing these values with the emotional coding to sustain them under stress.

Losing it is one of the great enemies of performance for any athlete or professional.

Young athletes often explode in frustration. It often is directed at themselves for failing to achieve their ideal outcome. But too often, especially with young male athletes, they explode at and blame referees, rancorous fans or opponents who showed them up, got in a hit or succeeded. They aim their anger and vexation to blame anyone but themselves.

Their past anger and acting out primes referees and other players to expect the worse. Players do not get the benefit of the doubt and will get called for fouls even if they did not commit them. Other teams target such players and goad them. They take cheap shots and talk trash and push and shove trying to goad the player into “losing it.” If the goading pulls a player of his or her game, this degrades his or her performance but also hurts the entire team.

This loss of control usually reflects a failure to take responsibility or remember the obligation to the team. The individual blames a failure on someone else. This often occurs in games when a foul is called and the player takes off on the referee. They yell and scream and get so caught up in blaming the referee that again their attention diffuses and they cannot collect themselves to be present and focused to what is going on. They play distracted and opponents take advantage of their distraction and lingering anger to provoke more distraction and anger. The same might occur when they are fouled or believe an opponent has fouled them or attempted to hurt them. 

Opponents take advantage of individuals who do not have self-mastery. A goaded player will get angry and yell and jaw and may even attempt to physically contact the opponent, which would simply elicit a foul against them. How many times have players who were hit gotten called for a foul for their retaliation while the initial “foul” is missed?

Losing control becomes a habit. People default to established patterns that reinforce future action. The longer an individual allows themselves to get angry and lose focus and act out, the more this becomes imbedded as a default action—they start to react that way out of habit and it takes conscious reflection and practice to break the habit. That habit can be exploited by opponents and distrusted by teammates and allies. Individuals excuse themselves as just being me or expressing myself or see it as an isolated incident when the reality grows into habitual responses that undermine their attention, discipline and expertise.

When a player loses self-control, she or he loses focus and s judgment. Their actions disrupt the scheme of their team, often draws penalties from referees. Angry and frustrated individuals try to do too much, free lance or seek revenge for a perceived slight.

The loss of control and focus can be contagious and infect other teammates. Fellow players are familiar with a player’s lack of responsibility and self-control. Referees are primed to look for them and penalize them. A player’s inability to stay focused and keep self-control throws off the fine tuned trust and reliance of the team. If fellow teammates expect someone to lose it, they will alter their behavior and undermine schemes because they do not trust the responsibility and maturity of a teammate.

Some players even internalize their own lack of self-control as a badge of honor. They prime themselves and become familiar with their own expected responses; sometimes making their own “explosiveness” a decoration rather than a sign of the selfish immaturity and selfishness. These actions reflect a form of egocentrism and ultra-individualism—individualism without responsibility.

The domain of self-control involves a person’s mind, perception, attitudes, emotions and body. Professional and sport excellence begins and ends with internal self-awareness and mastery. An individual must come to the moment of realization that “losing it” losing control, getting angry or blaming it on everybody else undermines effective performance and focus. This is the Archimedean point of sports ethics—the obligation to accept responsibility and control oneself. The individual learns to “let go” and get on with the game and their mission.

At the same time it requires the player to learn that they can educate their own emotions. The capacity to endure pain, the capacity to endure practice and loss and bounce back all require educating emotions to support intent and obligation to others. Players and professionals learn that emotions mark obligation but can be woven into sustained effort, endurance and resistance to mistakes and baiting. It takes emotional discipline and almost counter emotional constructs to deal with rancorous audiences, baiting players and mistakes or bad calls by referees.

The upside means that players can keep their focus upon the situational awareness around them. They do not get distracted and their focus and concentration do not stay anchored on the play before or anger at a referee or trying to make up for an unseen foul by the player earlier in the game. All of these diffuse concentration from being present to the situation before them. It distracts judgment and leads to slower decisions or decisions informed by ego driven needs rather than the requirements of the team and the play unfolding.  

The other upside means that a player then develops a reputation of self-control and focus. This reputation not only anchors performance by other team members but referees defer more to their actions—they can get the benefit of the doubt when they do slip because this is not the expected norm.

Players who internalize their ethics of self-control and focus upon what they can control—their own values, emotions, trained memories, trained perceptions and intent—model responsibility for themselves. It becomes self-reinforcing in life.

The player no longer externalizes their anger and frustration, but turns inward not in a destructive way but instructive way. He or she learns. This stance primes other teammates and models for other teammates how to go about their business. This control and learning drives them to get better. Individuals stop blaming others during the game and after the let go and focus upon getting better, improving their own self mastery, their own perception and pattern recognition through tape and their own technique through practice. Self-master leads to self-improvement and learning.

Remembering, “I can only control myself” depends upon self-aware responsibility. Like its opposite, it can be trained as a virtue and habit of response and action. This means retraining emotions to simply pause when the explosive adrenalin and cortisol unleash in the system.

This capacity to pause and conjure up counter emotions to offset the anger are critical to balance in the game At the same time the capacity to maintain a center of calm to understand that “I am losing it” and respond by reasserting control. This involves cognitive awareness and self-discipline to reign in anger but also pulling up alternative 

emotional/physical internal model to guide behavior. This alternative model resides in memory and practice and can become a practice and internalized response. The slow and steady extension of self-mastery to controlling emotions under stress permits individuals to intentionally channel self-expression rather than assume every action and emotions possesses legitimacy.

This habit of self-mastery helps professional address another reality of life--aging. In athletics the body reaches a peak in mid twenties to early thirties at the latest. As it ages capacity declines in certain areas and younger players with greater innate capacity enter as competitors. Players who understand what they can control adapt to their own physical changes. They do not give up, but develop technique to compensate or knowledge such as greater study of tendencies or even develop new approaches such as a pitcher developing new pitchers or strong armed quarterback learning to be more precise in midrange and short passes. 

Team cultures and coach modeling build up the social capital that supports young and old players achieving and sustaining self-mastery under stress and facing stress. Team leaders reinforce an ethic of keeping calm. Team members share a supportive ethics of not giving opponents an edge by handing them easy fouls or unfocused action. Teammates rush to each other to calm down and defuse anger and conflicts before they flare.

 Coaches model this and team leaders practice it. Too many coaches scream and yell and lose it on the sidelines and then wonder why their players play out of control and get unnecessary fouls. Show me an out of control coach on the sideline and I’ll show you an undisciplined team.

At the end of playoff game a Seahawk player put it best. Their opponents had spent a lot of time “taking cheap shots” to throw the players off. He got it right, “they tried to get me out of my zone, but we stayed in the zone.”

The Dog Days of Football

Early summer is hard on football players.

Quick and dirty count as of two days ago—15 arrests of professional football players this summer. 30 stories of arrests or players kicked off of college football teams this summer. The count rises each day. The incidents usually involve drugs or alcohol linked to assaults, mayhem or driving incidents. It happens every early summer to football players. The predictable articles and hue and cry will arise about how violent football players are, especially given the Aaron Hernandez murder charges. But this occurs each year at this time of year. It has its own rhythm tied to the dog days of summer. Why?

Football teams groom and recruit violent young men or men capable of angry controlled violence to play this game. The successful ones often live in a bubble that tends to protect them from too serious consequences for off field squabbles. At the same time, these young men, often from angry and violent backgrounds, learn that their bellicosity and strength can be channeled into “productive” activities. They learn to hit, smash, run, block, crunch, power through on the football field and get rewarded. They learn to endure pain and inflict pain as a path to glory and a future.

The point to remember here is that these young men ages 18-25. Young men do stupid violent things all the time, hopefully without too much hard being done.  Football players are rewarded for their belligerence and remain capable of calling upon violent action and exploding into controlled force at any time. Some escape to football from cultures where violence surrounds them and learning to be tactically violent is a survival tool. Others come to football with a huge residue of anger. Football players possess in abundance normal male fueled hostility and culturally fueled anger.

All football players possess the capacity for serious disorderly violence if the discipline and team ethos that shapes and directs it is not around. In this they are not so different from many other males their age—left without purpose or authority or structure; they get into trouble. College and professional football coaches are not noted for their gentleness, the culture and structure surrounding teams needed to nurture, control and direct the capacity to inflict and endure pain takes constant authority and strength.

Early summer poses multiple problems for college and professional football players. Many are too young to be married. Often they have little home or not much home to go to. Few of them have summer jobs to fill their day and exhaust them. Free time, boredom and lots of roiling energy—not a good combination.

More importantly during the early summer the football players are unmoored unless anchored in a family. Their peers doe not surround them with norms and goals that can support directing anger and tempers. Those peers also give them a culture of banter and bashing that permits lots of the competitive anger and violence to find safe outlets. Even safer outlets occur during practice and team condition drills or working one on one with trainers and coaches. During early summers college players are free—they may be in class, but are not imbedded in team or coaching authorities.

Likewise professional athletes who are not married are free with lots of money and status to wander and look for ways to get into trouble. They are not surrounded by teammates or coaches or minders.

On the other hand unlimited opportunities for fun and mischief beckon them. Lots of folks, friends, wannbes or hanger-ons will urge them on into trouble or not great situations at bars and clubs and parties. A few from the old neighborhood have other more twisted or complex agendas offering the fun and challenge and initiation of crime to their “old friends.”

Strong coaches, team rules and peer culture give them homes where they often had none. The stress and demands of forty to sixty hours a week of practice, conditioning and travel and playing dominate their times. Players often do not have the time or energy to get into serious trouble during the season. When it happens, it almost always happens at an after game party. These are the safe times that structure the matrix to grow as players and if done right as self-controlled young men.

It happens every summer. The arrests and charges for drinking related crimes or mayhem or assault will rise until camps begin. The discipline of teammates, coaches and sheer physical and mental work of being a modern football player will tap out or direct the anger and aggression. The common purpose of forming a team and winning championships will give purpose and meaning that undergird the discipline for the belligerence that so many can call upon.

With luck players will make it through the summer intact without too much damage to themselves or others. With luck, help and maturity, they will grow through the mess and temptations of early summer and end up as mature good men.

The Precarious World of College Coaches and ADs

As I reflect on the new year I can’t help but think about the 25 college football coaches who changed jobs at the end of last year. About 20 were fired, and the rest moved to new jobs. The coaching slaughter at D1 athletics occurs annually. Sometimes it is richly deserved as with Bobby Petrino for his scurrilous lying and cheating at Arkansas. This year we learned elite college coaches now only have two years to turn around programs with Jon Embree at Colorado. Sometimes it ends a fine career as with Ted Tedford’s ten years at Cal. This predictable year-end carnage got me to thinking of how brutal college athletics leadership has become, and how insecure the tenure is for the senior elite college athletic leaders—coaches and athletic directors. I believe this  remarkable insecurity helps drive  the craziness of recruiting, cheating and salaries in elite college sports.

To get some perspective I thought over my almost eight years serving as a faculty athletic representative in the Pacific 10/12 conference. While my numbers may not be perfect based upon faulty memory, here is the carnage of the 10 original Pac 10 schools over that 8-year period:

Athletic Directors            21

Football Coaches            22

Basketball Coaches         24

30 leadership positions associated with revenue sports—67 personnel changes—200+ percent turnover.

The PAC 10/12 is a destination conference; most leave involuntarily. Only six left voluntarily, one to be a college vice president and one to be a conference commissioner, 2 to the NFL and 1 to the NBA. The rest left under duress. Athletic directors and head football and basketball coaches do not get fired or hired these days without the involvement of the college presidents.  This means all these firings involved the complicity of the President and often regents of the university.

NCAA President Mark Emmert dislikes the locution “business of college athletics,” so do I. Maybe the "enterprise of college athletics?" Not sure, but no words can hide the brittle brutal reality that coaches and athletic directors get fired if they do not win. Winning brings revenue and prestige and can temporarily satisfy insatiable boosters. As I learned, it does not matter how many students you graduate; it almost does not matter how many minor or line skirting violations you have, unless you bring horrible scandal to the university. The reality and incentives for coaches and athletic directors are clear—Win. 

Commentators scream and bemoan the cheating and legal shading and excessive rules of the NCAA. But this constellation is all connected. Coaches and athletic director must win. They know that and despite the rhetoric, little else matters. The frantic drive to win and win fast and continue winning, drives the obsession with recruiting. It drives the obsession with keeping student athletes happy once they arrive. It drives the fixation on high salaries to get the best coaching talent, but also the knowledge of the coach that they can be fired in an instant even for a winning season.  These drives are fed by possessive, obsessive and over-involved boosters who pay for the bloated salaries and new facilities as well as sponsor the skirting of the rules outside of the boundaries of the program. The inordinate power of the boosters also accounts for how little time coaches now have to build programs and how little leeway they have to have a bad season or two.  Even as astoundingly successful coach as Chip Kelly at Oregon finds himself on the outs with boosters because he does not kowtow to their whims.

This win or nothing environment and the reality that a coach or AD can go from hero to pariah in three months shapes the environment that molds coaches and athletic directors.

We all know how tightly strung modern college coaches are. These are not laid back guys; they are driven competitors and hate to lose as much as they love to win.  We see them go off like volcanoes on the sideline sometimes against their own players or assistants. At practices they can sometimes seem almost maniacal in their intensity and demands on 19 year olds. Most morph into unbelievable control freaks focusing upon micro-managing details, recruiting and games. We can watch the living archetype with Nick Saban at Alabama and see the costs of it with what happened with Urban Meyer when he had to take a sabbatical from the game to protect his health and sanity.

We need to remember that coaches are human beings, and most of them stay in college because they love working with student athletes and helping athletes grow as people as well as players. They enter coaching as driven, smart and passionate human beings. But the ultra competitive and hair trigger firing environment shapes them in ways most of them would not choose to grow. Professional sports goes through coaches at a relentless rate; the day after the end of the 2012 NFL season 7 head coaches and 5 general managers were fired. But NFL teams make no pretense to educate, care for and help young men grow. Sadly most college coaches really do care about helping their student athletes grow as humans as well as players, but they also know they are not rewarded for the quality of humanity they instill in their students.

We can bemoan a lot of this, and it has always been with us. Go back forty or fifty years and the same problems existed, the same obsessions and the same corruptions. There was less money and less TV exposure, but college sports, like most things in life, never had a time of innocence.

The point I want to make here is that to a considerable extent the behavior of coaches and athletic directors is shaped by the precarious demands of their jobs and the signals sent to them about winning as the absolute priority. Even worse all the coaches see that moral sluggards like Bobby Petrino gets hired by whomever it was that hired him. 

Despite the craziness most coaches still coach. In most college sports they receive decent pay and graduate students and love their job, their sports and their student athletes. Even at the crazed elite levels of the revenue sports you still can see this shine through in quiet moments or early time before practice or team meetings. But the players are not stupid, they are 19-22 years old, but they know their coaches are on the firing line and they feel their own responsibility when a coach gets fired.

I want to make clear that the problem here ultimately lies with the Presidents and the boosters whom they serve. Every coach who has been fired knows what it is like to be a hero one day and a nonperson the next, wiped out of the history and marketing of the university as thoroughly as Orwell would wipe someone out in 1984.

The good Presidents know they are complicit and feel trapped, riding a tiger of revenue and passion they cannot ultimately control. Most Presidents have far more important and deeper issues to attend to than college athletics, but it takes an inordinate amount of their time and accounts for most of the press their universities receive. Few like or enjoy this, yet they continue to clamor to join Division 1A athletics and football even knowing the costs and losses.

I believe this anger and fear over being trapped accounts for much of the energy driving the Presidents for modern reform. They may never get the TV money monster under control, but they know they have to try. The changes in high school requirements, progress towards degree, the penalties of APR and the new attempts to deny access of NCAA championships tied to graduation rates all create cumulative vectors to redirect some of the coaches’ energy towards education and graduation of students. It also motivates athletic directors to invest more money in academic and student support.

But here again, even as they struggle to inflect academics back into the equations and change the incentive structure for coaches, we know that some president somewhere will reliably hire a moral failure like Bobby Petrino to coach again or that John Caliperi with two vacated championships will be hired again.

At this time of pressure and absurdity, the coaches face pressures and firing windows that exist in no other industry. Yet they stay in. The vast majority live almost nomadic lives moving from team to team when staffs are fired or they have a chance to move up. But the vast majority still care about the student athletes. They still struggle to teach about life along with sport; about learning along with winning.

These leaders live in a toxic system sustained by world class educators. Some make huge salaries, most make good salaries with very unstable and nomadic lives.  They coach from passion and joy in their sport and loyalty to their students. The incentives of the elite level and their putative academic leaders often erode this, but they carry on. I salute them.