The Times colors darkly the future of two beloved New York Jets football players, Al Toon and Wayne Chrebet, in their battles with NFL concussions.  The players themselves take pains to say they are doing fine.

“I do have some residual but nothing significant,” Toon, 48, said in a phone interview from his office. “Nothing I care to talk about in public. I’m able to live a happy life.”  Chrebet, 38, was also reluctant to get into specifics about the lingering effects of his concussions except to say they exist.  In an e-mail he wrote: “While I have never spoken about what I’m going through today because of this, I can say that I am proud of the way I played, and new rules or old ones there was a good chance that the same thing would have happened to me. I stuck my nose where it didn’t belong sometimes and I paid for it. And boy it felt great. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

So.  The players testify they’re okay, but the Times isn’t having it.

Since Toon and Chrebet retired, the N.F.L., shamed into taking action after disclosures about the devastating effects of concussions, has put in place practices designed to lessen their ravaging impact.

“Shamed.”  “Ravaging impact.”  And, of course:

According to a 2007 study by the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes at the University of North Carolina, retired N.F.L. players who had sustained three or more on-field concussions were three times as likely to experience depression in retirement than other players.

Three Times.  That’s 300 percent, baby.  Except we know how to count at the Persuasion Blog.  Instead of that deliberately inflated Risk Ratio, if you compute the effect size from that study it is less than a Small Windowpane at about a 48/52.  And given that the analysis is based on a biased and convenience sample and only on the self report of either an athlete or someone else we should maintain a scientific dubiousity about claims of a conclusive, powerful, and unambiguous relationship between NFL concussion and any future cognitive dysfunction.

But, apparently the NYT is smarter than all that.  They got the meme on this one.  Gridiron warriors cut down in their prime by greedy, heartless owners trading players’ bodies and health for profit.  The bastards.

Of course, based on the best available evidence we’ve got, the future risk is at best, Small, indeed barely detectable above random variation.  Given the poor methodological quality of the data, we can remain open to an alternative conclusion that really, there’s no effect at all.  Of course the null hypothesis doesn’t sell papers.

All Bad Science Is Persuasive.

What’s the statute of limitations on potential NCAA violations? Just look at this picture from the WVU Media Day in 1988.

Hey, that’s the tailback from a team that will go 11-0 and play for the National Championship against Notre Dame. Don’t I look like one of those sleazy sports agents or party boy entourage hangers or, even worse, Dr. Feelgood? Yet, I was only a highly respected and poorly paid doc student who just liked football. I’d met Eugene Napoleon two years earlier in my Comm80 large lecture course where Eug served as a Sports Beat reporter. I had most of WVU scholarship athletes in that class at one time or another from 1986 to 1999. The class got so famous that WVU Presidents would come in for a Star Turn during Rock Break; the conspiracy runs that deep, wide, and high. And, we can’t forget the Playboy Girls of the Big East! Sorry, no pictures, but they were all hotter than Michelle Pfeiffer, and believe me, while I’m no Jack Kennedy, I knew Michelle Pfeiffer.

Next year, Eugene’s son will join the Mountaineers football team as a scholarship athlete. Maybe QB. The son’s smarter than the father. He must have watched the game tape of Eugie hitting the hole. “Gonna be like this all day, baby.” Markus Paul, Syracuse, to Eugene Napoleon, WVU, 1988.

Americans love football and this week marks the start of the 2011 NFL season.  Are you ready for some football?  Are you ready for some dissonance?

The Dallas Cowboys had a big win over the New York Jets within their grasp late in the 4th quarter.  Poised to score a touchdown that would provide a 14 point lead and a virtual lock on victory, Cowboy quarterback Tony Romo reverted to earlier form and panicked when a play broke down.  He fumbled the ball (YouTube), lost it to the Jets, who then charged on to win the game on a last second field goal, that courtesy of a Tony Romo interception throw.  The facts suggest that Mr. Romo had a bad game.  So did he.

“I cost us the football game tonight,” he said.

So that’s the reality.  But what’s the psychology?  Consider this comment from a Romo teammate.

“At this point I don’t really care about what the fans say about him on the outside looking in,” said defensive end Jason Hatcher.  “I don’t care.  I love Romo.  I’m going to fight for him as long as I’m here.  He’s going to be my quarterback and we’re going to ride with him.

“I love Romo.”

In persuasion speak that is also known as Dissonance Reduction.  When you are suffering for that which you love, you tend to ease the pain of suffering with greater love, which is exactly what Jason Hatcher is expressing here.  He knows the reality of Romo’s performance and that his team lost the game because Romo made two bad plays that were under his control.  Yet, Hatcher does not comment with some cliché like “We’ve gotta play harder!” but instead falls off the persuasion log with the gravity of Dissonance and Its Reduction.

You see the crucial elements of Dissonance Theory here.  Lots of hot commitment, personal responsibility, mistakes, and, most importantly, suffering for what you love:  The game, the moment, your teammates, the prestige, the glory.

Dissonance Reduction is a double edged sword.  In tough times, it maintains cohesion, morale, and motivation.  However, it can blind you to changes you need to make to win.  It can show who values love more than victory.

My first Rule of persuasion explains why the outcomes of any Persuasion Play are always subject to doubt. You can use the Laws of Physics to hit the moon with a rocket, but you can’t use the Laws of Persuasion to reliably hit your own butt. Or as William Goldman puts it about making hit movies: Nobody Knows Anything. Here are three illustrations from the news today that illustrate the Rules, not the Laws, of Persuasion.

Persuasion for Blind Justice

Raj Rajaratnam ran a fabulously successful hedge fund, Galleon Group. The Feds figured out that Rajaratnam’s fabulous success arose from three factors: Great Talent, Hard Work, and Insider Trading. The first two are legal while the third, certainly useful, is not. So the Feds charged Rajaratnam and put him on trial. To defend himself, Rajaratnam hired a persuasion team to advise him jury selection, witness selection, and case design.

Empirical Creative was paid about $300,000, the people familiar with the situation say, for services that included a mock trial, during which his lawyers employed two main defense themes: that the information prosecutors said involved illegal inside tips was already public, and that the government’s witnesses weren’t credible.

Hey, baby, persuasion in the courtroom!

The consultants, James Dobson and David Klein of Empirical Creative LLC of Ronkonkoma, N.Y., got the jury they sought, according to people familiar with the situation. The panel was composed of teachers and government and health-care workers, among others, who the consultants thought might view the U.S. case with skepticism and weigh the defendants’ arguments carefully, the people familiar with the situation said.

So how did it go?

But in the end, the jury convicted Mr. Rajaratnam on all 14 counts lodged against him.

Persuasion on appeal!

It Takes a lot of Money Just to get Beat

The basketball world has loved the Fab Five since those Fab 1990s at UMich. Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Ray Jackson, and Jimmy King hit college BB like a hip hop freight train and nothing was the same. These fearless freshmen made two consecutive NCAA Finals and then went on to long and successful NBA careers. How successful?

Where the Fab Five did excel is at staying healthy and productive, which enabled them to earn astronomical sums. The four Fab Fivers who reached the NBA made a combined $431 million in salary, based on estimates and news reports—$526 million when adjusted for inflation.

And that doesn’t include any of the illegal booster payments to the Fabsters while in college which caused the NCAA to crush UMich with sanctions and penalties. But, hey think of all the titles that money bought. Oh, yeah.

Despite being the most celebrated group of recruits in college-basketball history, Michigan’s Fab Five—Juwan Howard, Ray Jackson, Jimmy King, Jalen Rose and Chris Webber—have never won a significant title.

No NCAA title. No NBA title. No Olympic title. Nada. But they did get paid a half a billion dollars to take their talents to the hardwood! If you’re making that kinda money and never winning a Big One, you’ve got some serious persuasion mojo.

Nobody Nose Nothing

Keep your nose clean and you’ll stay healthier. But how do you keep your nose clean? Stick a hose up there, rinse, then blow.

You can’t sell that, can you?

At first, she tried selling to a captive audience—patients and their parents—and even then it was a struggle to get them to try it out. “You want me to do what? And where?” was a familiar response. She knew pitching to complete strangers would be an even stickier problem, but it was a step she had to take.

This from the physician who developed a nasal wash dispenser and tried to sell it. She talked to persuasion mavens.

A consultant warned, “Don’t ever show the actual nose washing, because it’s gross.”

Another warned.

“It’s going to be a bit more challenging to market a gross product,” says Bruce I. Newman, a professor of marketing at DePaul University.

Sounds like you might want to find a new product to sell because this one is almost persuasion proof. But wait!

She rounded up some of her cutest patients—think two-year-olds with long blond curls—and got them to demonstrate Nasopure, complete with water running out of their noses. She persuaded a handsome young man to take off his shirt, stand in a shower and strike a “Zoolander” pose while squirting saline up his nose.

Little kids (YouTube) sell anything.

And so do sexy boys (YouTube) and girls.

Outro

While persuasion never always works, you can always try persuasion. Read the tea leaves of these case studies, mavens and muggles, and find the Rules.

Drive with Science and Putt with Poetry!

Randy Moss has announced his retirement from the National Football League.   Melanie and I watched Mr. Moss in action at Mountaineer Stadium when he was a member of the Marshall University Thundering Herd playing against my WVU Mountaineers in 1997.  It was one helluva college game with WVU opening to a huge lead, then the Herd, Thundering back, and finally the Herd making mistakes and WVU closing them out in a game with several future NFL stars including Marc Bulger, Amos Zereoue, and Gary Stills for WVU and Chad Pennington for Marshall.

This slideshow purports to show Randy’s greatest catches and includes just one from his college days.  As a long time football fan, son of a football coach, and middle linebacker at heart, I can testify that the slideshow misses one of the greatest catches and runs I’ve ever seen from a wide out.

In that 1997 Marshall-WVU game, Marshall stayed close.  WVU won, but Moss was the man among boys.  He caught an over the shoulder one handed grab on a sideline route, stiff-armed the first tackle, then juked and dainty-stepped over a second tackler like the safety was a baby on a comforter, then finally was pushed out of bounds by a trailing linebacker.  The catch, stiff-arm, and step flowed as one balletic movement and is one of the greatest athletic performances I’ve ever seen in my life.

Randy Moss was . . . straight cash, homey (YouTube).