Not to reopen this can of worms, but I'll just say my objection to momentum isn't that it doesn't exist, it's that it's very hard to use in any predictive capacity, and more often than not is used retrospectively as a crutch argument to argue in favor of whatever someone already believes. So if a team goes for two, fails, and then loses, people attribute it to the momentum swing. But if they fail and then still hold on no one mentions it, or else they cite something the other team did that swung it back the other way, in which case, how damaging could that momentum swing have been if it could so easily swing back?
I dig that and it's a fair comment if you're looking at it with a goal in mind.
See, it's weird but I can remember games (just varsity high school) where you felt it and knew it. It's just a feeling, however, and you can't really explain it, pinpoint it, or quantify it. You can explain it and I wonder why there's an audience that refuses to believe something so almost universally held by the people participating. This isn't directed at you, but can you imagine a ton of other situations where that happens in this day in age? What's weirder is that people who do not listen to the practitioners of the thing when they are describing what is happening is a weird sort of authoritative claim to objectivity and truth about that which they do not have personal knowledge of. I get why they might feel that way about unreason or emotion but there's just a weird hierarchy that it implies and it was always off-putting to me.
To address your objection about not being able to use it in any predictive capacity, well there are two objections I have. That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist like Gally and I are discussing, but I'll see your complaint about coaches using it to make decisions (or worse, ducking the ramifications of properly made decisions by copping out with a convenient excuse that nobody can disprove). But I've already submitted that momentum exists, and that participants can feel it as it happens. To take a decision-maker and strip of that sort of claim or authority to act on behalf of his players in the name of that which seems to fail the bounds of that which is reasonable, you kind of have to assume that the people making the immediate decisions, who are intimately familiar on a corporeal and emotional level with the players who are tasked with following that decision-maker's directions as best they can—well, you have to assume that the decision-maker either 1) does not deserve the autonomy and authority to make decisions regarding his players' feelings at the time of the momentum shift, or 2) he cannot access or be privy to his players' feelings at the time of the momentum shift because it is actually impossible to identify or act upon a momentum swing before it does its full damage are really making some pretty drastic arguments. The second reason is more plausible and less contradictory than the first. Saying that this is impossible to either identify or to stop either places us back in the first paragraph or strangely claims that humans no longer have agency over forces that they thought they controlled just a moment ago. So that seems strange. The first assertion, which sought to tell the coach or decision-maker he should not act upon this and therefore, decisions like that are the purview of the front office totally defeats the purpose of an arbiter and decision-maker placed among the men playing the game. His raison d'etre is to not only communicate decisions rapidly, but to gauge and deal with the emotional responses to both the game and also the hopefully wise and prudent judgments made by the coach. The emotional part of the equation is half of the reason he has the position of coach. It's inherent in the job description. Anyway, this has been a half an hour. Thanks for the time.
