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Thoughts & Rants of a Behavior Scientist
In the Thoughts & Rants of a Behavior Scientist Show, Dr. Paul “Paulie” Gavoni looks at common issues or phenomena in our personal and professional lives, gives you his thoughts, sometimes rants about it, and provides you with practical solutions rooted in the science of human behavior.
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Thoughts & Rants of a Behavior Scientist
Revolutionizing Professional Sports: Brett Yaris on Behavior Analysis in the NFL
This conversation is essential for anyone interested in how behavior analysis can be applied outside its usual settings. If you are interested in learning more about expanding your own career and pursuing your passion, stay tuned for an upcoming webinar titled "The Path Less Taken: A Roadmap for Behavior Analysts Seeking New Avenues" where Dr. Nick Green and I unpack the behavioral principles that have not only supported our success but can also serve as a guide for others seeking to navigate their way to fulfilling careers outside the conventional applications of ABA. This webinar promises empowerment, offering strategies, insights, and the inspiration needed to take the plunge into new domains where behavior analysts can thrive, proving that with the right mindset and tools, the world truly is an expansive oyster waiting to be explored.
Football Behavior Newsletter
NFL Predictions With Football Behavior
Shaping the Basics w/ Kansas City Chiefs Lucas Niang
Be sure to subscribe to Dr. Paulie's Heart & Science YouTube channel for a variety of content related to behavior science and bringing out the best in yourself and others.
Welcome to the thoughts and rants of a behavior scientist show Hosted by Wall Street Journal in USA Today. Best-selling author, dr Pauley. Okay, welcome back to the thoughts and rants of behavior scientists podcast. I'm your host, dr Pauley, and I'm here with Brett Yaris. Yeah, am I saying that, right, brett?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yaris, yep.
Speaker 1:All right, good man Now. So let me, I have to been in True, true transparency, which I try to keep it as real and honest as I can. I don't know much about Brett. I saw a post that he made on LinkedIn and I noted that he is doing some stuff with ABA in NFL and thought, oh man, there's actually Somebody else that's in the world of professional sports. That's also behavior analyst, because I'm not.
Speaker 1:I am unaware of other people and I'm guessing that they're, they're somewhere doing something. I am personally unaware of that. I know that the people are doing stuff in collegiate sports and amateur sports and that kind of stuff, so, but I'm sure that there are others out there like us. I don't think it's very many, and I know you. I'm guessing you might be just like I might be the only one that's been doing an MMA, you might be the only one that's doing in the NFL, and if there are more, you know, hey, let's get you on as well. So when I saw that, I'm like this is great, people need to hear this and I want to find out more. And in another side note, that is, there's a few people that we clearly have in common. I didn't even say your name. I said, hey, I'm gonna be interviewing somebody, break somebody about the NFL and say your name and a couple of my friends Right away. So it was that bread. Yeah, it was there. And I said, well, why should I introduce you one of them's, dr Nick Green.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, Nick Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nick's cool man. In fact, I need to put a little plug here. I told him I do this morning, because we are actually speaking of this, we're gonna be doing a webinar called the path less taken a roadmap for behavior analysts seeking new avenues. Unpack our own journey on how we've ended up in our passion Working with the science. So I think you know what we're gonna talk about with you today. It's gonna be a little bit about that, like how you got into this stuff. So, anyways, welcome. Welcome to the podcast, brother. Glad to hear it. Have you on, yeah not appreciate it.
Speaker 2:I'm really excited, like you said, you know it's, um, you know it with a ba it's, it's rarefied air to find people who have sort of diverted from the pipeline of special education, pediatric service, and I think you know what. What makes me maybe a little bit unique even in that level, is that I haven't fully moved away from special education or pediatric service. You know, that's obviously how I got my start, so I discovered the science, but for the last decade or so a little bit more than that I've been working with professional football players and that has led to several things that I'm sure we'll talk about as we, as we go on here. But yeah, it's definitely a different avenue and I always like to to say this at the outset excuse me of all the you know, the podcast that I do or interviews that I do, and I assume a lot of people who listen to you or BCBA is right, like you know those four letters.
Speaker 1:take their podcast yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're, they're the coveted four letters of the field. But I, as it stands right now, and not a BCBA I Am. I always say that I'm a behaviorist Because I have foregone BCBA certification and that's because of a you know and I've talked to. I'm sure we have like Matt Sequoria in common and this is something I've talked with Matt about a lot on his show. You know, I have just a very deep philosophical difference with the way the board Treats our field, treats our science, and so I've chosen to not, to continue, to not continue with with board certification. That's a personal decision, you know, for me, but I want people to know that at the outset because I know that Ethically, referring to yourself as a BCBA when you're not is not good.
Speaker 1:But I appreciate it, man. My passion is disseminating the science, man. So the science is just there, whether you're certified or not. That sounds like it's a whole different discussion. Maybe you know we could get on the podcast another time. Talk about that. But were you trained as a behavior analyst? Did you go through formal education?
Speaker 2:Yeah, but did all my course work at FIT, florida Institute of Technology.
Speaker 1:Yeah, good me too went through that.
Speaker 2:I've been masters in special education and the only reason I got my masters in special education Was so that I could pursue a BA. I had gotten a job my first job out of college, and my bachelor's degree is in liberal studies, which is like the adult version of undeclared right. So, you know, I I was just hoping to coach football, like that's all I wanted to do. I, my playing career was over. I had played against future NFL players in high school and by playing against them, knew that the NFL was not in my future, had, you know, also some injury issues and stuff, and so I just really wanted to coach and I didn't really know what to do career-wise.
Speaker 2:So when I got out of college, you know, I applied for a high school coaching job in Westchester, new York, westchester County, where it's the county like just north of New York City for those who are geographically inclined, unlike myself and so when I applied for that job I got it. You know, you can come be an assistant football coach here for one of the teams, but you have to do something else for the school. You can't just be a football coach in Westchester County, you have to do some other job for the school that you're working in, and so the only job they had available at this point was a one-to-one aid position for a child with autism, a middle school student and I was like I know anything about autism. I didn't know anything about special education or education, but all I knew the way it sounded, the way it was sold to me was to follow this kid around all day and then I can go coach football and get paid for it. Oh, like this is the easiest money I'm ever green back principal man yes.
Speaker 2:So, like you know, I'm thinking this is gonna be easy, it's gonna be cake, you know. But man, what a three weeks in. I was ready to quit that three weeks and I was ready to quit the job because I Clearly did not have any type of training that was gonna Help me. You know this, this student and the students that were in this self-contained program at the time I've had a lot of aggressive behaviors that I had never experienced in my life before and there was just it was just a very volatile situation that I just was like, wow, I'm not built for this.
Speaker 2:And there was a BCBA who was contracted with the school district, who came in and and began to introduce a BA to me. She was car boned train, so a little bit more, little bit different than I think, what we're used to now when the way students are trained now in a BA. But it was fascinating to me because I was employing some of these techniques and I was finding success. I was going home less beaten up at the end of the day and I was like, okay, I think this is it, I think this is what I want to do. And so I looked up like how do you go into a BA. How do you pursue that? And you need a degree in it or a related field to pursue the coursework. And so I chose to get a master's in special education For the purposes of going through to that. So I did that and, yeah, I got formally, did all my coursework at FIT, did supervision for a couple years after that, because I I actually ended up Serendipitously through the process, I became the teacher in that classroom.
Speaker 2:That I was okay and I had a couple philosophical differences with the way the public school education works for special education, and so I thought I'd give my hand in the private field and I worked at a private school for a couple years and when that wasn't Fulfilling what I thought was gonna be helpful, I opened up my own, my own shop. And this is actually a good segue into football, because what I ended up deciding and feeling was that, in both the public and private sectors for special education, probably one of the most beneficial services we could provide in those settings for individuals with special needs was physical education. Obviously, we know the statistics about the the large increase in sedentary behavior in that population. We know that there are multiples more likely to develop chronic illness. That's preventable In a society that's already multiples above the rest of the world in development chronic chronic illness.
Speaker 2:And I felt that, you know, seeing how physical education was done for this population, I was like man, this sucks, like we should be way better. You know these kids come to gym class and we're just walking in circles around the gym. Or they're 18 years old and they're riding giant tricycles and and not being taught anything that's gonna help them when they're 40, 45 50 years old, right like these lifelong active living skills. So I decided that I was going to use a ba To not just work with this population but treat movement skills and movement patterns the way we treat other behaviors and employ shaping and conditioning techniques To teach students how to not just develop fitness routines but how to learn exercises, do them safely, correctly, but also make them less punishing, right and love for you know conditioning getting in shape and Working out whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And so you know, surely, into that endeavor, right, that's called the behavior movement. That's the company that I started. I ran into a high school football player, a senior who was, who heard about what I was doing with special needs kids but was, you know, experiencing significant back pain and knew that I had a background in football. So he asked if I could watch him do a workout and see if I could assess any movement pattern deficiencies, deficiencies he was having. And long story short, because I've been talking already for a while, that student ended up becoming a premier college football player who introduced me because of the development in his football technique that we worked on, introduced me to his teammates, all of which got drafted into the NFL. Then word about me spread to their NFL teammates and that's how I got my foot in working with a lot of NFL players over the last decade.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, I actually want to talk to you all fair about a couple of things too, because it's got my mind spinning on this stuff in a good way. So it's interesting because our stories mirror, nick's stories mirror, and that is. A lot of people want to grab a job in the thing that they want to do with the science, but just a lot of people have not pioneered this stuff yet. But the great thing is that's the science of behavior. So anywhere somebody's behaving we can insert ourselves. But just like myself, you had to still have a job, a day job, and do things afterwards Like it's really unavoidable, I think, until the science is just common language, where people recognize the worth of it and people are being hired as NFL behavior analysts etc. Etc. Whatever industry that we're focused on. But it just has to be the way it is and it makes long days. But I think the good news about is that that second half of your day you're in your passion. That's why I mentioned the pre-mech principle earlier. This is your big reinforcer here and it's going to lead to hopefully invest, you do it right, you produce a valued outcome and look what happens.
Speaker 1:A lot of people are like and I was like this at first thing well, nobody's listening to me, but you have to get them in touch with reinforcement bottom line. So you've got to get them to behave well enough and long enough where they produce some sort of reinforcement. In my new book I call that the leading hat rights and establishing operation. Right, you've got to create a want. We get the behavior moving.
Speaker 1:And then there are different hats. We got to put on the training hat, the coaching hat, the managing hat, all in service of getting people to behave well enough and long enough. That's producing some sort of positive reinforcement for them. So that's going to take over. But you are also being paired with that positive reinforcement because clearly you were, you helped one. You spread the word like check out this dude Brett making a difference in me, and like, look, we don't know how that's like real dissemination If they start applying those principles within their own camp, their own training regiments, understanding their own behavior a little bit more, putting on the behavioral lens of the things that they're doing. That's very powerful, man. But I got to think it was still. It's still tiring in the moment right, when you're working all day and doing stuff afterwards.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a good point. Tiring is such a good word because there's a lot of modes that getting tired takes throughout this process. Right, there's that physical exhaustion of pushing yourself for a lot of hours in a day, especially applying the science in a physical way, right, with movement, technique, things of that sort. But then there's that mental drain. It's the. You mentioned this, you know, when you were speaking before, when you said you know there are people out there, they're just not listening to me, right, that constant rejection is, you know it may not be real rejection, right, it may be perceived rejection, right, we're not getting the immediate results and so we perceive like it's being rejected, when really it's just you're laying the foundation, right, the bright lights right around the corner there. Yeah, I keep pushing through that.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it's tiring because those are, you're trying to do something that no one else is doing, and when you're doing that, you're trying to change preconceived notions. And what you're really trying to do is you're trying to change established behavior in somebody else, right, when somebody has, especially in a field that doesn't isn't familiar with our science, right, so when you're pushing into football, they've been doing things the same way for a century, right, there's 100 years of established behavior that you're not going to change overnight. And if you understand that, you go into the process with that understanding, then it becomes a little less daunting because you realize that every little I say this a lot to my clients, and I say this when I give talks that the goal for us is never perfection. Right, perfection in this case is like overnight people go, wow, aba is the only way we should be doing things, and then we're going to completely move to this. Now, right, that's perfection.
Speaker 2:Perfection is unattainable. It's not a thing that you're going to get. The goal should always be progress. And if you are so prideful that an inch of progress isn't enough for you because you're chasing a mile of progress, well then you're going to miss out on what it takes to get to the mile. It takes an inch. You got to go an inch With shaping, that's it. That's it.
Speaker 1:It's shaping If you look at that. I agree with that 100%. I'd like to say that you know, science doesn't give us all the answers, but it helps us to find the best ones. Yeah, and so you know. This is why it just it's so powerful. We should keep our lands on. You know one of the things that I address, I have one of my books.
Speaker 1:It's called Quick Wins. I wrote it with Anika Kosser our second edition and it's about that very thing. It's about initiating change and getting people in touch with some sort of of reinforcement. Organizationally, right, it's like an organizational but behavioral momentum, if you were. You have to get people in touch with some sort of reinforcement and that initially is probably going to mean establishing yourself as a reinforcer. So you're an EO. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Like, hey, just give this a try, man, you know, find that one thing you know in the fight game, you know it would be like it's you know, the guy lands his punch a little bit more or he gets hit less. Right, I want it to be. You know it's positive reinforcement. But that's setting up the positive reinforcement, because you know you're getting off your strikes by getting hit less. It feels better. Hey, you know there's all these positive things that come with it, but we do have to get people in touch with it.
Speaker 1:Stop talking about the science and all the great things they can do, make it happen, you know, but find something small because, to your point, you're not going to make these big changes. You know it's like, you know it's behavioral chaining, you know, and it's it's, it's shaping, and you know there are a bunch of small things. But if you highlight that path to begin with and it becomes predictable and people know they're moving towards that end result, there's these series of accomplishments that occurs and those serve as reinforcers to a larger goal. And when they understand the path, if you've done a great job of explaining it, highlighting it, and they're beginning to reflect on what they're doing, they're seeing that producing outcome that's going to take over man. That's when it's going to. You know, make all the difference in any field at all. I mean, still, the basic principles of behavior analysis are still at the root of it. It's the DNA of it. It's the DNA of. I mean, I think you are working directly with, with players, correct? Am I correct in saying that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So I mean there's I mean I do, I do a lot there's. There's the players aspect and I and you know, as a spec roll, we'll spend a lot of time on that. But you know, five years ago I co-founded a media company and my value add to to my, the partnership group there was was bringing this experience, not just the experience of behavior science, but I was the only one who worked with NFL players. I knew what they cared about, I knew what motivated them, I knew what got them to pay attention to media, what they needed reinforcers.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and so you know, we built that to one of the bigger football media companies out there until it was purchased by an even bigger fish. And you know, now I have football behavior, which is the brand that I'm doing now, which is an analytics company that are analytics based solely on ABA, precision, teaching, standard, acceleration, charting, and that's making you know some headway. So you know, the long answer is I am really trying to push this into all areas of football, not just direct technique training. But yes, the beginning of that was working with players, finding success with that and then lending that success to new areas.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I was thinking. The reason why because I want to hear more about your company, what you're doing with the analytics there and the precision teaching and the predictive stuff is that when you start working with coaches now you, now we got our OBM lens on and we're really disseminating the science and these principles and now we get massive changes across an entire team, especially if we start kind of going up the chart right up to leadership. You know, you know I think about these skills again, these four hats and how, like, every person needs to be wearing these different four hats. If you are trying to improve the performance of anybody at any level, whether you're the CEO of the company or whatever it's called in the NFL, going down to you know the each level of the coaches, they're still. You're still trying to get the best out of the people you're supporting, and so this requires understanding how to wear these different, these four hats, and they're these four hats are response, functional response classes, and it's all grounded in, you know, the four term contingency. It's everything that we do. So our science can just be used at the molecular level and the molar level.
Speaker 1:Man, we could do self individually, we could shape up that nuance, as you very well know, at this level of sports and professional sports, it's the nuance. It's that small behavior, it's that slight pivot with the back foot, it's the elbow being just so here instead of there. All these small changes have massive impact at when you are functioning at this level. I mean, you think about sprinters. You know, if they shave off a tenth of a second, that's the difference between winning and losing. You know, people are like a tenth of a second, that's nothing, that's huge. And sprinting, you know.
Speaker 2:I mean it's the. That's the same measurement in the NFL, a tenth of a second. I mean, the first player I was working with was an offensive lineman, the high school player who went to the NFL when we began to work his technique. You know he was going to go to TCU, texas Christian University, at the time of a big, big 12, you know top big 12 school and you know, looking at his high school tape, I noticed that when he was getting out of his dancing for the uninitiated in football you're missing out on the greatest game that this country offers.
Speaker 2:But for the uninitiated in football, the the offensive tackle is is on the end of the offensive line. Who protects the quarterback? Right, he's stopping the quarterback from getting sacked, getting hit and all of those things. And when he's, you know he's got to move backwards, while there are 250 to 280 pound men running through him, running forwards right. And I noticed in his tape when he was trying to get out of his stance backwards, he was popping up vertically, then coming back on a lateral plane right. And so what we did is we shaped that vertical pop up out of his stance and TCU wanted to redshirt him right, they wanted him to basically sit on the bench for a year and develop. But we worked all that offseason on refining his technique because they thought he was too raw, right? So we refine his technique that entire offseason and when he showed up, by the way, this is you working.
Speaker 1:Are you working just for free with him Because you love for passion of the game?
Speaker 2:At this point.
Speaker 1:Yes, it was. I just want people to hear this like it requires an investment At this point.
Speaker 2:it was free, it was a yeah, it was a time investment, but it was something I just. I felt that there was a, if this worked right, if I pulled this off, then I thought, man, there is a huge opportunity here and this is going to be my life, this is going to be my lab right, you have a vision.
Speaker 2:And so he he ends up showing up to campus as a true freshman at TCU, and his technique had changed so dramatically that they decided not to redshirt him. And he was actually going to be what's called the swing tackle, which is, if any of the tackles go down the starters he's the first one off the bench, regardless of what side it is, and that was a big thing. Then he he comes home after his freshman year and we do more work even more talk about a major reinforcer for yeah.
Speaker 2:So he's now. He's motivated, right. He wants to come back and get this work in. So we do all this work and he goes back as a sophomore and all of a sudden he is beating these junior and senior defensive linemen who were killing him the year before in practice, right, and these are guys, by the way, who end up getting drafted in the NFL. Ben Banagu gets drafted to the Indianapolis Colts, lj Collier gets drafted first round to the Seattle Seahawks. So these are guys, these are, these are real dudes. He's going against the TCU in practice.
Speaker 2:And again, speaking about reinforcers, because they're now getting beat by a guy they were killing Ben and LJ said to say to him they go hey, what did you do in this? Why are you so much better? Like what's going on here? And he tells them he goes hey, I work with this guy, he's got this different approach to how, how we train technique and boom, those guys jump on board, right. So it's a reinforcer for them, even though they're not directly experiencing you know, they're not directly experiencing the the change in their own behavior.
Speaker 1:Well, teo for them. They want, they're going to want to do, but they're seeing this guy doing like let me jump on it.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. And then it just, it just rolled from there. They got drafted, you know, they told their agents about me, their agents told their other clients about me and it just snowballed, you know, from there. And that same tackle, just to put a pin on this, this particular you know story, this case, what I was, what I became most known for. And you, you talk about speaking with the coaches and working with the coaches, because you also got to establish for them. Right, because, like a team like the Kansas City Chiefs, who this guy ended up getting drafted to and playing for, who plays for them now, the Kansas City Chiefs, they have a way of doing things. Everyone's got to remember that. Right, the NFL is not a singular universe. It's a multiverse of madness of 32 teams.
Speaker 2:And each coach has their own way of teaching. Even if it's offensive line play, their offensive line guy does it this way, where the New York Giants do it in a different way, and so I got to work with that coach and make sure that coach trusts that I'm going to make you know this guy, the best Kansas City Chief that there is.
Speaker 2:So, COVID happens in 2020. This happens to be the year he gets drafted. This Lucas Nyang, by the way, is his name, for I know I keep saying this guy, Lucas Nyang is his name. He gets drafted in a TCU in 2020, the year of the pandemic right, and everything gets put on hold and the NFL offers players the ability to opt out for that year.
Speaker 2:They won't lose a year of their contract and all these things, but they don't have to play for that year until everyone feels safe. And Lucas opted out. He decided to opt out his rookie year, taking a big risk. He gets drafted to the Kansas City Chiefs. This is the year immediately following them being in the Super Bowl and losing to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers because the offensive line is not playing well right. So, like he's poised to go make a big difference and he decides to opt out, and he made that decision. At the time a study in the Big 10 had come out that offensive linemen in the Big 10 teams were suffering heart complications from COVID. To be clear, not the vaccine COVID. They were suffering heart complications from COVID and this is very early in the pandemic. And so Lucas, being in that playing an offensive line position having a pre medical condition, decides it's not worth the risk right now. He wants to opt out till better safeguards are in place. So for an entire calendar year I'm the only person who worked with him.
Speaker 1:Oh my. We were talking about isolating a variable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we. I worked with the Kansas City Chiefs coaches to understand. I want to know their practice schedule because we were going to keep to that schedule. Okay, I wanted to recreate the environment as best I could for him, but we worked that entire year and he shows up the next year. Now he gets drafted, takes an entire year off, shows up the next year and he's the starting right tackle on a Super Bowl team. Okay, I'm telling you, unfortunately, until he gets hurt. He ruptured his patellar tendon late in that season.
Speaker 2:But the point is is that that is the thing that really kind of pushed forward when we talked about reinforcers, coaches and players and agency that this guy takes a whole year away from the NFL and then shows back up to become a starter on a Super Bowl team. They go how did you do that? Oh, I was with this guy who uses behavior science to train me and that's why I was able to maintain a lot of this stuff that we worked on. So that was a big deal and there's a whole. You know we did a YouTube series on it, by the way, you can see a lot of the work I did with him on YouTube.
Speaker 1:Yeah, make sure, when we're done, just for listeners, send me those links and anything that you have and I'll make sure I drop in the show notes. So I want to go back in two things. One is that some people would think, well, I'm not an expert in football. Right Now I've actually gone out and spoken to people lacrosse coaches. I've just got done speaking, doing a. I do. I do keynotes and talks everywhere to financial advisors.
Speaker 1:I know nothing about either, but I do know the science of human behavior, and so, as a behavior analyst, you don't always have to be a content expert. You find out what results they want and what behaviors are supposed to be being engaged, and then you can help them get more of these behaviors over here and less of those behaviors over there. So I want to make it clear that you don't have to be a football expert to make a difference. But it sounds like you also had that content knowledge. You had an expertise in that, so you could actually help to shape this guy's behavior up based on what you knew he should be doing versus what he should be doing. Am I correct in saying that?
Speaker 2:I would. I would say I mean, yeah, absolutely on the right, the right path there, but I would say I didn't have content knowledge at that time. I had content passion, but I loved football. Right, I was a big fan of the game. I played it at a high school level, which is in no way preparation for understanding the nfl style of play, um, but I wouldn't say that I was an expert at it, to your point. Right, I also coached lacrosse and played lacrosse. I would not consider myself a lacrosse expert, um, but when this, this particular player, got in front of me at that time, um, it wasn't even football that I was helping him with, it was how to do squats better, so he didn't have back pain. Uh, right, it just the the. To your point, they bring your, your clients, your, your audience, if you want to call them that. I I hate the word client, by the way, I know I. I think I'm weird in that way. They just seem so.
Speaker 1:I say learner, the learner yeah learner.
Speaker 2:I love that right, so you know they're gonna bring their challenges to you. That's when you begin to investigate. That's when you start to become, or want to become, an expert in their challenge. I didn't become an nfl expert, I would say now, working with different players at different positions on different teams. Um, and then what I've done in the last five or six years in the, in the football, the larger football landscape, in the, in the media space. I'm much more of a football expert than I was when I started, but what I was an expert in when I started was Lucas Nyang's problems.
Speaker 1:That's what I became well said man, well said, and that's what. That's the beauty of behavior analysis. If I go into an organization or at school, they have, they have their own problems and there's a reason for those problems and although they might have some similar Reasons, you know some similar root causes. Um, we still have to refine the intervention based on what the needs of that organization are, the needs of that team, and it's still boiling down to the behaviors of the individuals to figure out what the pivotal behaviors are that we can work on, behaviors that are going to get them in touch with their reinforcers. That becomes really critical. So, uh, it's powerful. You said that.
Speaker 1:I will also say that, as a, as a boxing coach, as a mixed martial arts striking coach and specialist, um, I evolved, of course, uh, my, um, my approach to coaching and what I was focusing on. But I studied, I went back and studied like Mike Tyson style and a very homestyle and Muhammad Ali and and different, you know, because I focused on the striking. I figured out those nuances, because it just comes down to behavior, and then I tried them out myself. You know, um, testing them out in the cajun ring. I took some extra beatings because of that, because they weren't actually Pardon me, but I figured out what was working and I was able to Train people based on their genetic makeup, for example, like the short guys. Hey, this is gonna this is gonna get you in touch with more reinforcers. You know, then, doing it this way because this is better for long guys, it'd be like, you know, you train in the center different than you're gonna be training the linebacker. You know, I don't know what's that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, uh, so I'm wondering I, without going into too much detail, because for me A lot of people think, oh well, you know there's, we got clickers out, we're doing all this. I use just the basic behavior principles, uh, and I wish I had metrics for everything. I had some metrics that I use, but there's stuff with biofeedback that were important. Um, I'm probably the height of what I did was with a with a good friend of mine, dr Alex admins, where we broke down Every round into 10 second intervals and, uh, I had the fighter doing a certain combination and, man, I got so much biofeedback on it. I could see the combinations that were taxing him more than others, right, so this would be the almost a measure of fluency, like they're all say, five punch combinations. But why is this one Is heart rate elevating here based? The other one we could see, I could see how much movement he was doing. It's such a, how many times he was getting hit. We count that he would do it to take a look at it, count his own behaviors in a manner really Helped. Um, but some of the stuff is just like you know, I'm trying to help them see contrast In doing it this way versus that way. Right, they need to recognize they're getting hit less. Now, having cold hard data, it accelerates it big time.
Speaker 1:I have my guys do film study but it's not just looking at stuff. I discriminate certain behaviors, I break it down to those intervals and I have it score themselves. And I've had guys who have been like there's certain things like in the fight game I say, keep your hands up. Well, not necessarily, look at Muhammad Ali, roy Jones Jr. You know the james tony lair homes. There's a number of fighters that kept their hands down and they use distance as they're built in defense. So but if you've been to your point conditioned to think about I always have to have my hands up.
Speaker 1:I need for my fighter to recognize the difference. So I'd have him count how many times he was hit with his hands were up versus how many times he was hit when his hands were in the position I want to, and I had been telling him for a year to change it. When I had him study the video and did the interval, it changed on a dime. So the power of getting some sort of graphic feedback, some visual analysis, having them recognize A and b right, very, very powerful. But I'm wondering what are a couple of the key things, without going into too much detail, man, because I really want to go on to your next, you know your next venture and hear about that, but what are the couple key things that you've done with Working directly with the athlete that are kind of grounded in some of the behavior principles?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So a lot of um. What I've tried to do is is try to best replicate the environment that I know they're going to be in either on a practice or a sunday, and I will say I have the benefit of, or had the benefit of Of age. I'm still relatively young where I'm holding man. Uh, right now I'm 34.
Speaker 1:Okay, look good, dude, you got a baby. Face man.
Speaker 2:I shame for you. So the uh, but you know I, so I I actually put myself a lot in the drills because you talk a lot about the, the bio feedback, right, or the physiological response and and in contact sports, collision sports like football, I'm combat sports like MMA and boxing Um, what they feel is going to be Really reinforcing compared to what you tell them right, and I would say and you illustrated this, I think, beautifully is like it's what they feel, then what they see Right, whether it's in film, study or wherever else and then what you tell them right, and hopefully, what they feel and what they see marries to what you've been telling them, and that's where you get this great Synergy. But you'll see it, if you watch that youtube series, you'll see I'm in the drill, I'm a pass rusher. I'm in the drill, I am going, I'm getting my ass kicked, but I am in there, uh, you know really, really pushing him as a pass rusher, so he can feel the difference between you know, hey, I am going to use a swim move on you, right, and then on this next rep, I'm going to use a, a spin move, and you got to feel what that difference is. So you know how to react. You know how to respond because that's what we worked on a lot was latency. Decreasing latency right, for I'm sure everyone knows this if you're listening to this podcast. But right, latency is that that, that time difference between the stimulus appearing and your response to it. Right, and a lot in football. You need that latency to be weighed down. You got to see it and react instantly.
Speaker 2:We talked about the tenth of a second being this, this big differentiator. And so one of the things I would do to work on latency is I would do what's called a free for all drill. We would. We would drill these different. You know, uh, move, pass, rush, moves, rip, swim, spin, bull, all these different things. And then I would say, okay, we're gonna do a free for all. You have no idea what's coming. I'm not gonna tell you. We're gonna do five reps in a row. Each one is gonna be different. It might be all five of the same thing. You have no idea. It's a free generalization folks.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And then what we would do is we would look and say, okay, did he respond correctly to the, to the move? We would do it. This is all, but all of a sudden, all on the youtube series you can see, I'm not just, you know bs, and you hear on this um.
Speaker 2:The other thing I would do is I would physically, I would add what what I would call physical environmental changes, um, beyond just myself being in the drill. So when we worked getting up, uh, removing that vertical pop-up from his stance, I would put in, okay, a Um, like I would hold like a bar or a pad over his shoulder and if that shoulder hit the pad immediately we would stop and start the rep over um. So a lot of environmental and then shaping that right and then so the bag would start out high and then I'd come a little bit lower and come a little bit lower and shaping, I would say, is like the biggest Technique that we would use. I did a little bit of tag teaching um a little bit, and I probably Modified it to our needs a little bit. Um, you know, using a clicker or or an audio Sort of cue as to whether or not a response was correct or not, um, but what I would do is I would use the whistle, because the whistle is something that he hears a lot in the football environment.
Speaker 2:Right, coaches, wraps, they all blow whistles to signal the end or start of something. So I tried my best to Really focus on what the environment for him was going to be like in the matters that, in the moments that mattered for his performance, and I tried my best to replicate that In the sessions that manipulated to our advantage. So not just shaping his behavior but shaping the environment To bring out what was going to be the best, you know, performing for him.
Speaker 1:And I know the other guys that we work with. So I'm going to come back to my hats now, and I have, uh, what you did is very similar what I've done in MMA. I mean, still, it's, of course, is going to be, if we've had success, it was grounded in behavior principles. And so, uh, using just the hat illustration of these four hats, um, having the leading hat on, you had to create a want for him to want to engage in that stuff, right, uh? And so, uh, I don't know, he might have been in a state of deprivation for something he was losing, you know. So there's already that. And he said, hey, we could do this stuff, you're getting moved in the right direction, but now you have to engage in the training hat. You have to, you have to make sure that you're equipping him with the right skills Right, so he has a vision of what he wants to be. Now you're building the skills right, one skill at a time, whatever it is, breaking that skill down to behavior. Here's where the rubber meets the road and the lines with what, the things that you're talking about, and I'm proud that my colleague, dr Nick Wedley, and I kind of coined this functionally. So we go from the training hat to the coaching hat.
Speaker 1:People forget about this. They don't even differentiate this, right, but within the science, we can differentiate it. Training is about skill acquisition. Coaching is about supporting a generation of learned skills into the natural environment. Right, and one of the most powerful ways you can do this is through simulations. What you're talking about is simulations, and in my world, simulations are sparring, and this is what's often missing in every industry. Right, people are trained, they get theory, they might even have good training, behavior skills training.
Speaker 1:My fighter might look great outside of the cage or ring. I drop in the ring. They're going to take a beating because those responses got to become automatic and I have to make sure I control the variables that are being thrown at them and make sure that I'm getting him in touch with her, in touch with some sort of reinforcement, right. So now they can respond to these dynamic variables and I start to layer back in right, I start to fade back in all the other variables. So at first they're just slipping one jab, right, and we're doing that. 30% and the 40% and 50%. Pretty soon they're fluent with slipping the jab. Now it's the two, right, we're doing it with each punch, then I start to make it the one, two, right, then it's the two, three, and then we're starting to generalize all this stuff and pretty soon they're able to slip these punches effectively back.
Speaker 1:I got to make sure that they got the body mechanics best and then the final piece is the managing hat that I call it, and this is about maintenance. Right, so we get these skills, we generalize them, but now we need these skills to maintain, and this is like we do it in your system, or training is, and this is getting them to take, you know, evaluate their own performance and see how well they're doing versus. You know, here's what I should be doing, here's what I was doing. Am I doing those things and having a system for that happening? So it seems like we're engaging in a lot of the same type of approaches.
Speaker 1:I think in our own field, simulations, right of behavior analysis, are missing way too much theory. We need a theory because it's the science, right. So I'm not knocking that piece of it, but we need simulations and we need it through, probably like gamification or some way where people can take the concept of positive reinforcement and apply it to special needs. They can apply it in sports, like somehow you and I weren't conditioned to think about it this way. We're like I was surrounded by a bunch of behavior analysts.
Speaker 1:I didn't go to. I didn't go to the university at first. I ended up going back to FIT many years later because, god bless them, dr Jose Martinez Diaz gave me a scholarship back, and how can I refuse? I took all my coursework over and did it and so, but I could see even going back through it, like all the coursework are. You're being provided examples that are about you know, everything's at the mid-elect or level. A lot of it's in special needs populations, and so people aren't given the chance to think about how you apply this in other settings. I call it behavior myopia, right, when we're only thinking about it here and not thinking about like the principles are always the same and so people are kind of stuck in the matrix and I'd love to kind of break them out Then in my discussion.
Speaker 1:I think differently, which you are doing that. But, by the way, how did you do that? Why did you think differently than the average person? I've got my own thoughts I just mentioned by. Like, what got you out of thinking about just using the science here where you could use it elsewhere For me? I just thought I didn't go read research. I thought, wait a second, I'm a behavior analyst and this is behavior. Let me start looking at what I'm doing and why it's working and then, when I start doing that, I also figure out why some things weren't working. And this is how I got came up with the concept of the generalization skills and, like I got to put on my coaching hat and create this environment so those skills grow up and they can work in the real world when the real fight comes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would. I would say that along the way there were maybe a couple of things that pushed me even further into it, where maybe at the beginning I wasn't thinking about sports I definitely wasn't thinking about sports but a few things that were said or taught in the course of the journey. Right, we're like man. What if I did this over here? And the first thing being the first time I heard the definition of behavior as everything a living thing does, and that stuck to me because I was like, wow, a living thing. I'm here because I'm working with these kids with autism and that's why I'm trying to learn the science a little bit better. But you didn't say everything an autistic person does. You said behaviors, everything a living thing does, and that that stuck with me. So that probably was the first like, even subconsciously, just having me think you know otherwise.
Speaker 1:Just could be by anywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then throughout the course of the, the, the coursework I, in the Cooper Herron book okay, the white Bible there was a a figure about free throw fluency in women's college basketball. In fact it's the only non, non pediatric or special needs example in the entire book and in a lot of the coursework that we were given. But I was like, wow, this is sports, this is cool, like this. This got to be something that I could do this here, so that the definition and then that chart in that book was like sort of the confirmation that this can be done in other things. Now I think a lot of it too has to be your personality.
Speaker 2:I. I believe that somewhere along the way I was conditioned to be rebellious. I left the public school setting because you know, as I mentioned, when I was a teacher, I pushed for a little bit of funding for for something, and I was told by the superintendent we are fair and appropriate, not optimal, and I said what does that mean? So we provide the floor, not the ceiling. And I said I don't know what. Can I curse on here?
Speaker 1:Yeah, go ahead, brother.
Speaker 2:I said bullshit.
Speaker 1:That's not that.
Speaker 2:I cannot operate that way.
Speaker 1:We are very similar.
Speaker 2:Right, I go to the private school and I see that there it's just like we charge an exorbitant amount of money for tuition special needs kids and we're going to babysit for six hours and collect our money. And she's like man, this shit, this system is so broken it is so broken, brother. My initial thought is to. I got to, I got to change it, and so, and by the way, to this day, I continue to work in special education with special needs families. I do a lot of advocacy.
Speaker 1:Are you working in a district or you it's like you work one. I have contracts.
Speaker 2:I have contracts with districts.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And then I have my own company where I work with with families privately.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I'll tell you that I I've lost district contracts because I'm just taking your values and because I and here's the here's the cold hard truth I am in a financial situation now, at this point in my career, where I could tell people to kick rocks yeah.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:You got to earn that.
Speaker 1:You got to earn that in business, yeah, so so it's nice, it's very empowering, isn't to be there?
Speaker 2:It is yeah so. So for me to, you know, to to figure out how can I move this science in a different direction. It started by moving it out of the classroom and out of, like the whatever you know you mentioned in, in, in, in ABA. You know that we put these kids across from us and we do these little things that don't really generalize the natural environment. It started for me moving out of the schools and focusing on movement and exercise and active living. That was my first point of diversion.
Speaker 2:Then it extrapolated from there into, specifically, football and sports, with, you know, the general population, and so, and then, and then NFL players, right To where we are now, and then everything that's come since. So a lot of it has just been this gradual progression. But it started with this idea that behavior is about living things regardless of diagnoses that they have. That was the very first thing, and then seeing an example in the litter of it not being applied to special education was sort of the green light to move forward, and that's that's. You know how we got to where I'm at now, very cool, man Again.
Speaker 1:Once again, some paths, similar approaches, same thing. And I'm actually do work in a. Besides the work I do with professional crisis management association, my colleague Anik and I do stuff OBM and schools, you know, really focusing on a district and the school level change there. We actually have some stuff with different states as well. We're doing some stuff with Hawaii. I'm stoked, man, it's very cool to be able to make those changes yet.
Speaker 1:But I want to make the shift now, boy. Do we have similar paths? Although it looks topographically different, functionally it's the same. How tell me about this whole use of precision teaching and the science for doing, for predicting, I guess, for predicting outcomes with it? Is that what you're doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah now yeah. So let me backtrack for a second and I promise it leads to the end of the rainbow here. In my work with NFL players, I began to implement the concepts of precision teaching. I began to track data in a way that was nonlinear for the first time and just was stunned by you mentioned being able to show people the results, right, the data and was blown away by the data I was able to provide people.
Speaker 1:What kind of data are you tracking?
Speaker 2:So an example would be for a pass rusher. We were doing a drill where he would have to not to get two in the weeds. The pass rusher has to go around the arc we call it. It's the path they take to the quarterback and they want to shorten that arc so that they can get to where the quarterback is. They don't overshoot, and so I would make the path really narrow and I would make it really difficult and I would track frequency of being able to do that. But I would time it Right. So I would say, okay, you have two minutes to do this correctly as many times as you can. And what we were tracking simultaneously was the precision, the ability to do it correctly. But then we were working on fatigue and fluency. How often could he do it without getting tired? Because in the NFL you heard something called the two-minute offense at the end of the half or the end of the game. It's called the hurry up offense. There is no break.
Speaker 1:Well, and that's also something that can be tracked through biofeedback. You can see what their heart rate is, how quickly they're recovering what it was in terms of in compared to the time they did it completed the task, yeah.
Speaker 2:So if I was able to show this pass rusher on day one, hey, we do two-minute intervals here and you're getting about three per minute, three correct responses per minute, or six in that total drill, and at the end of a week you're up to 15 in the drill, or seven and a half per minute.
Speaker 1:I think reinforce, or he's seeing his own progress.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then I can say, hey, I can now precisely not to use a pun there, but I can now precisely say you improved day to day or interval to interval by X amount of percent.
Speaker 1:Which is very rare for a coach to be able to come in and do that. Or, and also, they're only looking at the long-term outcome Are we scoring touchdowns? Are we doing this and that? And we know, if we pinpoint the right behaviors, eventually we're going to get that pie in the sky outcome that we're shooting for.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And then I would start to track it simultaneously against the competing behavior, right or behavior we wanted to see decelerate or decrease, and then being able to use the overall improvement index and go over that stuff. So that was the start of implementing it into football and into sports and be like, wow, this is great. Then, shortly after the formation of that media company it's called Pro Football Network, by the way, I'm not affiliated with it anymore. I sold my stake when we got acquired, but my focus there was I was working with these players and these coaches and they all complained about how there's more access to information in football now than there's ever been for the fans. Yet the fans are less informed about football than they've ever been. What are you going to do with all?
Speaker 1:of that. It looks good, the color graphs look great, but what's all this stuff mean?
Speaker 2:And I think that's actually a larger societal issue. I think that goes beyond football. But the reality is that there are companies and I'll tell you that. I'll name them. I have no issue here, but Pro Football Focus is a very famous data analysis company for football and they provide all these different things and the players hate it because they're just making stuff up. There's no way Like there's grading, like they grade players, and it's like how do you know what my coach told me to do on this given play?
Speaker 1:Right, like you're saying, I did it wrong. What's the standard we're shooting for? How do you know? I didn't do exactly what my coach told me to do. And you're saying it was a suboptimal.
Speaker 2:And, by the way, this is like six years ago. I'm having these thoughts in this conversation. Just recently, jj Watt, one of the best defensive players who's ever played football, came out and called out Pro Football Focus and said like guys, you guys, you don't know what you're doing and this is public in Google, this is all over the place, you're making stuff up and so that's an opportunity right there.
Speaker 2:When something like that pops up for you, yeah, so I start to think about OK, what can we? How can I continue to build on what I'm doing? But now put it into a bigger context a database. A lot of the problem is that these companies, these media companies, these analysis companies, they're trying to standardize what you see on the field every Sunday. They treat every environment, every team, every year, every past season it's all the same, and the reality is it's not.
Speaker 2:The NFL is this and I called it before it says multiverse of madness, and we believe, as behaviorists, that the environment is such a big role in how we behave. In the NFL, the environment is completely changing. Last year, a team, you know team A, had these players with these coaches, and the very next year, 40% of those players are gone and they have a whole new coaching staff. How could you reasonably say that those two environments are the same? They're not Right, and so that's a big area of focus for me is getting rid of that concept. But to what we said earlier this is the way it's been done now for close to two decades, and the fans have latched on to this belief.
Speaker 1:You know just pause there for a second, yeah, Just because I was thinking about this like what could make it stay similar is if they had really strong two things values and I'm going back to behaviors as values right Values and systems. You know good systems. So you have the coach, you hire the coach that has aligned values and then, like events of offensive coach that values these things. Okay, you meet the values that are of this organization and here's the system that we use to do it right, so their behaviors are aligned with that system. Then you might be able to keep things going in the right direction.
Speaker 1:But to your point now you've got a whole, probably because nobody's hiring based on that, you don't have a way to assess it. They probably don't even know what their own systems are or how to make the connections behaviorally, and so it's restarting anew every year and the best organizations are going to adapt. And that's the beauty of behavioral principles Organizations need to adapt or they die. You know, that's just like an organization and we don't want to rely on natural selection. We want to be able to pinpoint behaviors right. Yeah, absolutely Not. Let them happen accidentally through all these other things that can occur, like injury and losing and etc. Etc. And that's not just the case with the teams themselves.
Speaker 2:That's the case with the sports media industry. They're not adapting to what is actually meaningful and relevant to the information they should be giving to their audience. So when I first jumped on Pro Football Network, my goal was to bring a better education experience for the audience. Parley my experience, my direct knowledge and work with these guys and say, hey well, you keep getting, you keep getting fed over here. The actual humans on the field don't give a shit about, they don't care about it, it doesn't mean anything to them. So what I wanted to do was change that experience for the audience and I think for the four years that we built this company to your point that you bring up really eloquently reinforcers emerge that actually could divert your path and over the four years Pro Football Network became less about educating the way I wanted it to and more about getting clicks for ad revenue like every other media company.
Speaker 2:Because what we learned early on is that's what was bringing in money money being the audience With the shame because they don't think about sustainability and like make it a win and win.
Speaker 1:You know, take a little less at the beginning, right, but now you've got the greatest thing in the world and nothing else compares that, everything else going to fall off, and that's how you get that sustainability Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And, you know, maybe your audience is familiar with Ryan O'Donnell, the daily BA, but he is somebody that I brought over to Pro Football Network with me, and we had we had this grand vision for what we were going to do. In fact, today, as it stands, the most viewed content in Pro Football Network's history was put together by myself and Ryan, and so, after four years and it became becoming clear the direction that Pro Football Network was going, as we were, you know, people were coming to acquire us. I could no longer be okay, profiting off of something I didn't really believe in, and so this was an opportunity for me to kind of get paid and do something else, and so Pro Football Network continues to exist. It's now a subsidiary of another company, and their focus and they're good at it is to get as many clicks as they can, but that's not, personally, something that I believe in, and so what I've done now is start my own shop Football Behavior.
Speaker 2:Footballbehaviorcom is the website, and we have a free newsletter, and it's an analytics company, and we are doing NFL analytics better, and we start with a very, very simple expression Humans play football. Human behavior is predictable. Thereby, football behavior is predictable, and so, using the principles of ABA, precision, teaching, standard, acceleration, charting I have developed over 15 proprietary metrics and a database that allows me to make predictions about team and group behavior. That's a different environment for me, because I've been focused so much on individual behavior all this time, but for the last four or five years I've really been moving towards group behavior and predicting group outcomes, and so that's what I've been doing a lot of, and the model and all the metrics have been public for two years, though they've been backtested six years beyond that, so eight years in operation total.
Speaker 1:Oh man, very cool, and will you send me the link where people can find more information about that for the show notes as well, so they can take a look at the type of data that you're collecting and just dig into a little bit more?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think what's important to have people know, especially football fans who are familiar with companies like Pro Football, focus and ESPN and others, is when you hear stats metrics like EPA or Points Per Game or DVOA. These are metrics that are rooted in averages and standardization and, just from a basic statistics practice, right, anytime you try to use an average and pull it across multiple different environments but use it as a standard average, that's bad statistical practice, especially for prediction. It amounts to a 50-50 guess. It's like the example of the divorce rate, right, it almost says the divorce rate is 50%. 50% of the barrage is going to end in divorce. Well, that's not true if you look at environments, right, because in two people or college educated and middle class or higher, they're likely to stay married forever, right?
Speaker 2:So what I try to do in my analytics is I bring the environmental context back to it and I don't make any assumptions. So there's no player grading. I'm not going to pretend to know what a certain player was coached to do. It's all objective and it's all about what the players and teams are actually doing on the field that I can observe and it just really gets back to the principles and roots of behavior science and applied behavior analysis and then using that to make predictions. And you know elite sports betters want to be right 55% of the time. We've hit on 68% of our prediction.
Speaker 1:That's incredible Wow.
Speaker 2:January 9th, before the playoffs started, I ran a simulation of the playoffs, every playoff game all the way to the Super Bowl. On January 9th, I told my newsletter subscribers that the Kansas City Chiefs were going to defeat the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl and that the Chiefs the point spread should be about half a point, that they're very, very evenly matched. Well, as it turned out, a month over a month later, the Chiefs would beat the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl in a game that would go to overtime and a game that ended in a tie after four quarters.
Speaker 1:Well, now did we at that point did that? They weren't the playoffs weren't done yet right?
Speaker 2:So we didn't even know they were going to be playoffs.
Speaker 1:They hadn't even started yet no, that's amazing man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, and again, it's all. It was all based on behavior. It was all based on what not just what they had done up to that point, but, as any anyone who's familiar with precision teaching will be able to talk about, it was about a lot about their celebration rates Right, it was. It was a lot about the way that their behavior was trending over time. It was a lot about their bounce rates, right, their consistency, and at the time I made that prediction, the Chiefs were plus 900 to win the Super Bowl. So for anyone who's not familiar with sports betting, they were not anywhere near being a favorite, and if you bet $100 on them to win Super Bowl, you'd get back 900 in profit, right, so that's like a. It was a long shot for them to win, but that's what our behavior charting was showing us.
Speaker 1:But you got about 100 to get 900, or has it been 900 to get 100?
Speaker 2:Bet 100 to get 900.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:That's how much of a long shot they were at that point, january 9th, to win the Super Bowl.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So when we made that prediction, a lot of people were like you're crazy, this is a Chiefs down year. They're not good this year, you know, the receivers suck and all these different things. And I said, all of that might be true in the way you look at statistics, but what I'm telling you is the way the behavior is tracking. This is what I think is most likely to happen and and I have some stuff that that's coming out over the next couple of weeks that are the actual transparent calculations and breakdowns of our metrics so people can see the behavior science involved. But what we really try to focus on is moving away from this reliance on averages.
Speaker 2:Okay, the Miami Dolphins this year everyone kept talking about their offense and how many points per game they averaged and all these things, and I was like man. That hasn't been true about them since week seven. If you, if you watch their trajectory, they're they're due for a collapse. We said the same thing about the Philadelphia Eagles. We said in August, before the season started, the Eagles, who had just been in the Super Bowl, are probably going to go through a severe regression at some point this season because their entire environment changed overnight. They lost their entire coaching staff, except their head coach, new coordinators, new systems, new players, that they're probably going to see some regression from that and then as the season went on, they were winning games and people kept telling us, oh look, they're winning.
Speaker 2:And we kept saying, yeah, but their behavior is not matching their record. Eventually it's going to come back to earth. They lost five of their last six games that got bounced in the first round of the playoffs. That isn't to say that we have the foolproof method and we can predict every outcome. You can't make variables way too many that and that we admittedly don't know and we'll never know unless we work for these teams.
Speaker 1:I'm getting 67. That's huge.
Speaker 2:I mean, that is a big, that is incredible man.
Speaker 1:It sounds like I bet it's unheard of.
Speaker 2:It's a big number A lot of people find a lot of issue with, with like is that, are you, is that really a liar? Are you a liar? And the great thing is I published it all before the games are played and in fact, every bet that, every prediction we've ever made, every bet we've ever placed, is all publicly available for people to go look at. So the you know you can't do this. You can't be in the analytics or prediction business and not be transparent. But so we are. But I want to.
Speaker 2:I want to emphasize that the sports betting is not the goal here. The sports betting is a proof of concept. It's how I can apply what I'm doing to something tangible, a reinforcer, if you will, for the audience. Right? What's most interesting to me through this process is what it actually means for teams, what teams could do with data like this. Right, if we're showing, you know, that a certain team is trending in a different way, we might be able to say to a team hey, you might want to change up the environment a little bit. You need to make a change now before this gets out of control, right, you know? Or vice versa at the end of a season, you know a coach, you know you might think a team underperformed, but we say, hey, actually, from start to finish, this team improved by 60% this season. Give this coach another chance. They're actually probably moving in the right direction. There's a lot of implications for this data.
Speaker 1:I can see being a coach and getting down to the molecular level, being a coach of coaches. So you have the offensive lineman coach, you have the quarterback coach and when they understand these principles, that can apply it. They can start using good metrics to let the you know, to know if they're on track or not, and then shared and even getting the having the players begin to self monitor and report out so they're recognizing their own behavior in the outcomes. Yeah, man, the power of behavior science. Well, brother, I think you know we got up to just maybe a little bit of our hour here. Man, you know, say again, I know I think you might have said it earlier on where can people reach out to you? I know we're going to put stuff in the show notes, but they want to say you know what? Hey, brett, I want to find out more from you, man, what's the best spot?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the best, the best thing to do is to go to football behaviorcom that's. That's our website. All of our content is there. All of our analytics are there. And then there's where you can sign up for the newsletter. Newsletter is free. It's 100% free. There is a paid option, but that's up to you guys at the side if you want to do that. But all of our content is available for free in that newsletter. You sign up there. When you sign up there, you can also you know all my contact information is there Send me an email.
Speaker 2:It's be yaris at football behaviorcom for those who just want to send an email and ask more questions. But I can talk about this stuff for eons. So please feel free to reach out, ask questions. There's nothing hidden here. There's nothing I'm trying to keep behind a veil for any type of sake. This has no value If you guys the audience don't see it as valuable. The only way for you to do that is to know everything about it, and I'm happy to always share that. So, like I said, please visit football behaviorcom for all that stuff.
Speaker 1:Thanks, come on, brother, it's been fun. Man, I love, love seeing people applying the science outside of the norm. Great job.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you.
