Momentum – The Most Overrated Concept in Sports
I thought it would be reasonable to assume that a team finishing their regular season 1-4 and then going on to win the Super Bowl would be enough evidence to debunk the antiquated concept that momentum has any real significance on the outcome of football games. This past Super Bowl had many moments that fans, reporters, and sportscasters labeled as momentum-shifting turning points in the game. In reality, momentum is just a flimsy, abstract, and arbitrary concept used in lieu of real and tangible measures of team performance (3rd down %, turnovers, etc.) to try and explain why teams win and lose football games.
The first big “momentum-shifting” play happened in the middle of the second quarter with the Ravens leading 14-3. The play was labeled as momentum altering after it happened by the CBS announcers, who then conveniently forgot about their bold statement when the Ravens continued to dominate the 49ers, and no “momentum” was ever shifted. On 4th down with 9 yards to go, the Ravens faked a field goal, snapped the ball straight to the kicker, and had him try and run for a first down. As soon as Justin Tucker got stopped about a yard short of the first down, the announcers immediately started killing the Ravens decision not to kick a field goal and take 3 points. The Ravens could have gone up by two touchdowns, the announcers theorized; instead, they allowed the 49ers to get a fourth down stop, which should energize them and shift the momentum towards their inevitable comeback. Of course, none of that happened. The 49ers took over at their own 6-yard line and ran three plays before punting the ball to the Ravens, who took over at about the 50-yard line. About one minute later, the Ravens scored on a long touchdown pass to Jacoby Jones. While the announcers were focusing on how much energy and motivation the 49ers would get from their fourth-down stop, they forgot the fact that even if they failed to convert on the fake field goal, the Ravens were leaving the 49ers with terrible field position. Even if they failed on fourth down, the Ravens knew they would still be in a dominant situation. Momentum is a conditional theory: it is used when convenient, but forgotten when not applicable. These series of plays in the 2nd quarter are just one example of why momentum is a lazy and deceiving concept.
Obviously, the event that will most likely be the defining moment of Super Bowl XLVII was the power outage that lasted for more than half an hour. The Ravens led the game 28-6 when the power went out, and the 49ers went 25-6 after power was restored. This noticeable flip-flop in scoring after the blackout is an obvious candidate for the momentum argument, but saying the blackout was the main reason for the 49ers comeback is a sloppy and lackadaisical simplification of what occurred. One of these sloppy explanations came from Loren Fogelman, a sports psychologist and consultant, who wrote about the shift in momentum in a February 6th article.
"The 49’ers showed a slow start, with the score 28-6 in the Raven’s favor. But the delay turned a wide lead into a close game. The break in momentum was just the thing the 49’ers needed to answer back. Just like the lights came back on the field, it seemed the 49’ers were sparked to get back into the game.
And maybe the Raven’s created a self-fulfilling prophecy. The time gap during the outage worked against the Raven’s. They broke their own momentum, shifting their focus from positive to negative."
Instead of trying to explain the comeback by using the mythological concept of momentum, lets try to break it down using tangible evidence and a fundamental understanding of football. Firstly, the reason you see so many comebacks in football is because big scoring margins often regress towards smaller scoring gaps, not bigger ones. Teams that are trailing by multiple touchdowns will often stop running the ball, get aggressive, and start scoring points against a team who is playing a prevent defense (allowing easy yardage while trying to prevent a big play) and is more focused on running out the clock than scoring more points. Secondly, lets dissect what happened immediately after power was restored to the Superdome. The case that everyone is making is that the 49ers stole momentum from the Ravens after the blackout. However, what happened on the first play after power was restored? The 49ers failed to convert on 3rd down and punted to the Ravens. The Ravens converted a first down on a 15 yard pass to Torrey Smith, ran two plays, and then came up half a yard short on third and long. The Ravens punted to the 49ers, who subsequently completed a couple of passes before Michael Crabtree scored on a touchdown pass after numerous Ravens failed to tackle him. I would argue that this touchdown is not a result of a shift in momentum, but simply a result of shoddy technique and poor team discipline. In the first half, when the Ravens had “momentum”, the 49ers missed tackles, failed to convert on third down (while the Ravens were 6-8 on third down in the first half), and committed dumb penalties. In the 2nd half, when the 49ers acquired the “momentum”, the Ravens started playing sloppy football, including committing a roughing the kicker penalty that gave the 49ers three extra points and going 3-8 on 3rd down. The Ravens did not play sloppy football in the second half because they lost momentum; they simply started making mistakes that they had avoided making in the first half.
Also, why was the blackout such a gift to the 49ers? Was it because it gave them 30 minutes to recover and regroup from the Ravens outplaying them? If all they needed was a break to capture the momentum, why didn’t halftime do the trick? The 49ers didn’t get a sudden spur of energy and momentum after the 30-minute halftime; in fact, the first play of the 3rd quarter was a playoff record 108-yard kickoff return for a touchdown by the Ravens. Furthermore, if the Ravens had all the momentum before the power outage, how were the 49ers able to have a 70+ yard drive at the end of the first half? The theory that the blackout gave the 49ers the momentum they needed for a comeback is lazy and easy to argue after the fact by people who can’t recall the play-by-play or can’t be troubled to peruse the statistics.
Momentum is an intangible and abstract theory that shouldn’t be used to explain wins and losses in the NFL. Maybe some veneer of momentum exists, but the amount of effort and post-game analysis that goes into defining momentum shifts and momentum-changing plays is careless, sloppy, and disingenuous. More than anything, momentum is an attempt to impose a certain narrative on independent events that happen within the context of a football game, rather than a way of actually understanding significant shifts in the emotional states of one or both teams. Because it is not possible to quantify the emotions of a player or of an entire team, it is important and necessary to use statistics, a proven measure of actual team performance, to understand why certain trends occur during a football game.
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