Scorecasting (13 page)

Loss aversion influences everything from everyday decisions to athletic performance to individual investments. It also affects our behavior as sports fans. Thanks to loss aversion, we tend to place a higher value on objects we
own
than on objects we don’t even if it’s the same object. In theory, our willingness to pay for something should be the same as our willingness to be deprived of it.
If you value LeBron James at $40 in your fantasy league, presumably you would pay $40 to own him or accept $40 to sell him. But it seldom plays out this way.

This phenomenon, related to loss aversion, has a name—the endowment effect—coined by
Richard Thaler, a behavioral economist at the University of Chicago. Thaler found that people feel the loss of something they own much more deeply than they feel the loss of something they don’t own. If we give you $100 and then take it away, that’s much more painful than telling you that we were going to give you $100 but decided not to.

To demonstrate the endowment effect,
Dan Ariely and
Ziv Carmon, two behavioral psychologists at Duke University, performed an experiment using basketball tickets. Duke, of course, has an exceptionally successful basketball team. It also has an exceptionally small basketball arena, the 9,314-seat Cameron Indoor Stadium. For most games, demand for tickets greatly outstrips supply. To allocate seats, the university has developed a complex selection process, and as much as a week before games, fans pitch tents in the grass in front of the arena and wait on line. For certain important games, even those who remain on line aren’t guaranteed a ticket, only entry in a raffle.

After tickets had been allocated for a Final Four game, the professors called all the students on the list who’d been in the raffle. Posing as ticket scalpers, they asked those who had not won a ticket to tell them the highest amount they would pay for one. The average answer was $170. When they asked the students who had won a ticket for the lowest amount at which they would sell, the average answer was $2,400. In other words, students who had randomly won the tickets and had them in their possession valued them roughly
14 times
higher than those who hadn’t.

For an even more vivid illustration of loss aversion, consider how you, as a fan, respond to wins and losses when your team plays. Your favorite NFL team is winning 30–3, and you’re justifiably confident that the game is in the bag. Suddenly the opposition stages a fierce comeback to close the score to 30–27, and you’re in panic mode. It turns out that your team hangs on for the win,
but you’re probably left feeling a bit hollow, less elated and triumphant than relieved and thankful. The other team’s fans probably feel disappointed, but it’s leavened by the surge of the comeback that fell just short.

Contrast this with what happens when two teams are locked in combat for hours. The lead alternates. Momentum fluctuates. Tension escalates. With the score tied 27–27, your team marches downfield and kicks a game-winning field goal as time expires.

Both games end with the exact same score, 30–27. We’re told all the time: “A win is a win is a win.” “Winning ugly is still winning.” “A blowout doesn’t get you extra points in the standings.” Again, how your team gets there shouldn’t matter, just as the past shouldn’t matter when we sell a stock or put a house on the real estate market. But from the perspective of fans, we know that’s seldom the case. A last-second field goal to decide a close game? When our team wins, we’re doing cartwheels, straining our larynxes, and high-fiving anyone within arm’s reach. We’re despondent and hurling the sofa cushions at the television when our team loses.

“How we got there” matters because as a game evolves, we adjust our loss-gain expectations accordingly. In the 30–3 game, we
own
the win. We count on it and account for it the same way a team with first and goal at the one-yard line counts on the touchdown. When it’s threatened, we face the loss of something we’d assumed was ours. And we hate loss even more than we like gain. Barely hanging on to what’s ours when it seemed a lock? Where’s the pleasure in that?

In a close game, when we live and die a little with each play, we haven’t made an accounting of gains and losses. We were never endowed with a victory; and we never steeled ourselves for a loss. So when the gain comes at the very end, it’s ecstasy. Nothing’s been unexpectedly taken. And when we lose at the end, we’re devastated. It’s the same phenomenon that takes hold when you play a Pick 6 lottery game. You chose your numbers, and right away there’s no match. Oh, well. You let it go with relatively little emotion. Now imagine that the first five numbers are matches. Only
one more to go for a $250 million payoff! The last number comes and … it’s not a match. Ouch. You lost in both situations. That’s all that should ultimately matter, but you feel the loss much more profoundly when the outcome is in doubt right up to the end.

Consider what happened at the annual Yale-Harvard football rivalry—self-aggrandizingly called “The Game”—in 1968. Yale entered the game nationally ranked, brandishing an 8–0 record and a 16-game winning streak. The team’s quarterback,
Brian Dowling, the biggest of big men on campus, was the figure immortalized as B.D. in the
Doonesbury
cartoon created by younger classmate Garry Trudeau. The lore was that Dowling hadn’t lost a game since sixth grade. Yale’s other standout was
Calvin Hill, a future Dallas Cowboys star running back as well as the future father of basketball star Grant Hill. Harvard also entered the game undefeated. In addition to bragging rights, the winner would take home the Ivy League title.

Yale controlled the game, up 29–13 with less than a minute to play. Yale fans were “endowed” with a gain. Harvard fans girded themselves for a loss. Then the unthinkable happened. After recovering a fumble, Harvard scored an unlikely touchdown. With nothing to lose, it tried a two-point conversion that was successful, making the score 29–21. As everyone in the Harvard Stadium expected, the Crimson attempted an onside kick. Yale fumbled the return, and Harvard recovered at midfield. Already, the anticipated thrill of victory by the Yale fans was being undercut by this flirtation with a loss, just as any agony of defeat by the Harvard faithful would be offset a bit by this late surge.

Harvard methodically moved the ball downfield. On the game’s last play from scrimmage, the Harvard quarterback scrambled and desperately chucked the ball to the corner of the end zone. A Harvard receiver snatched the ball for the touchdown. The score was now 29–27. Students were already storming the field when Harvard lined up for a two-point conversion on the final play of the game. The Harvard quarterback knifed a quick pass through the Yale defense that the intended receiver hauled in—29–29. Harvard had scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds—and with no overtime, the game ended in a tie.

The Harvard players, fans, and alumni were, of course, deliriously happy. Yale’s were crushed. But wait: The game ended in a tie. Shouldn’t both sides have felt an equal measure of pleasure and pain? Yeah, right. The same way a former Lehman Brothers executive once worth nine figures on paper and the newly crowned Powerball winner feel commensurate joy about their respective $5 million nest eggs. How you got there matters.

Forty years after the game, Harvard’s
Kevin Rafferty, a documentarian, revisited the afternoon and its effects on those involved. He was inspired in part by his father, a Yale football player in the 1940s who fought in World War II but described that Saturday in November 1968 as the “worst day of my life.” Many of the players went on to fabulously successful careers in business, law, medicine, and, in the case of Harvard’s all–Ivy League tackle Tommy Lee Jones, cinema. But four decades later, memories of that football game for most of them are still fresh, emotions still raw.

The title of the film, pulled from a
Harvard Crimson
headline, neatly summarizes loss aversion:
Harvard Beats Yale 29–29
.

OFFENSE WINS CHAMPIONSHIPS, TOO
 

The moment had arrived at last. In June 1991, Michael Jordan cemented his reputation as the best player of his era—check that: any era—by leading the
Chicago Bulls to the NBA title. As he cradled the trophy for the first time, his explanation for his team’s success had a familiar ring to anyone who’s ever played team sports. “Defense,” Jordan explained, “wins championships.” It might have been the most quoted maxim in the sports lexicon, but because Jordan said it, it now had the ring of gospel.

In 1996, the Bulls defeated the Seattle Sonics (R.I.P.) to win the title. By that time Jordan’s accumulation of rings had grown to four, yet his analysis of the Bulls’ success remained steady. “It’s been shown that defense wins championships,” he said. A year later, the Bulls beat the Utah Jazz, prompting Jordan to expand that sentiment: “Defense wins championships, without a doubt.” When the Bulls “three-peated” in 1998, Jordan declared, “Defense wins championships; that’s more evident than ever.”

The importance of defense is so self-evident that the only debate appears to involve a matter of degree. Several years ago, a
Los Angeles Times
columnist declared, “Defense wins championships, especially in the NHL.” A colleague at the
Contra Costa Times
begged to differ, writing, “Defense wins championships, especially in the NFL.” A writer at the
Philadelphia Inquirer
specified further: “Defense wins championships, especially in the NFC.” A Virginia Commonwealth hoops coach disagreed: “Defense wins championships, especially in basketball.” It appears that
defence
wins championships, too, according to various Canadian hockey coaches, British football (soccer) managers, and Australian rugby personalities.

The sentiment has hardened from cliché into an article of sports law. But is it actually
true
?

We found that when it comes to winning a title, or winning in sports in general for that matter, offense and defense carry uncannily similar weight.

Among the 44 NFL Super Bowls, the better defensive team—measured by points allowed that season—has won 29 times. The better offensive team has won 24 times.
^*
It’s a slight edge for defense, but it’s a pretty close call and not different from random chance. How many times has the Super Bowl champ been a top-five defensive team during the regular season? Twenty-eight. How many times was the Super Bowl champ ranked among the top five in offense? Twenty-seven. Nearly even.
^†

But we’re talking about only 44 games, so let’s broaden the sample size. There have been 407 NFL playoff games over the last 44 seasons. The better defensive teams have won 58 percent of them. The better offensive teams have won 62 percent of the time. (Sometimes, of course, the winning team is better both offensively and defensively, which explains why the total exceeds 100
percent.) That’s a slight edge to the offense, but again, pretty even. Collectively, teams with a top-five defense have won 195 playoff games. Teams with a top-five offense have won 192 playoff games. In almost 10,000 regular season games, the better defensive team has won 66.5 percent of the time compared with 67.4 percent of the time for the better offensive team. That’s a slight nod to the offense but a negligible difference.

But maybe the phrase “defense wins championships” means that defense is somehow more
necessary
than offense. Maybe a team can prevail with a middling offense, but not with a middling defense. As it turns out, that doesn’t hold up, either. Three times the Super Bowl champion ranked in the bottom half of the league in defense; only twice did it rank in the bottom half in offense. The lowest-ranked defensive team to win a Super Bowl was the 2006 Indianapolis Colts, rated nineteenth that year. (They offset that by ranking third in offense.) The lowest-ranked offensive team to win the Lombardi Trophy? The 2000
Baltimore Ravens, who ranked … nineteenth in offense but first in defense. In the NFL, it seems, teams need
either
exceptional defense
or
exceptional offense to win a championship. But neither one is markedly more important than the other.

What happens when the best offenses line up against the best defenses—say, the 2006 Colts versus the 2000 Baltimore Ravens? It turns out that 27 Super Bowls have pitted a top-five offense against a top-five defense. The best offensive team won 13, and the best defensive team won 14. Another stalemate.

In the NBA, too, defense is no more a prerequisite for success than offense is. (Sorry, Michael.) Of the 64 NBA championships from 1947 to 2010, the league’s best defensive teams during the regular season have won nine titles and the best offensive teams have won seven. That’s pretty even. In the playoffs, the better defensive teams win 54.4 percent of the time and the better offensive teams win 54.8 percent of the time—almost dead even. Among 50,000 or so regular season games, the better defensive teams win no more often than the better offensive teams. We see the same results in the NHL. There’s no greater concentration of Stanley
Cups, playoff wins, or regular season victories among the team playing the best defense/defence than among those playing the best offense.