When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(33)
Georgetown’s opponent in that 1982 NCAA championship game was the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, led by All-American forward James Worthy and coached by Dean Smith. Dean Smith was a well-regarded coach but also a snakebit one. He had coached the Tar Heels for twenty-one years, taken them to the Final Four six times, and advanced to three finals. But to the dismay of his basketball-crazed state, he’d never brought home a national title. In tournament games, opposing fans had taken to heckling him with cries of “Choke, Dean, choke.”
On the last Monday night of March, Smith’s Tar Heels and Thompson’s Hoyas faced off in the Louisiana Superdome in front of more than 61,000 fans, “the largest crowd ever to see a game in the Western Hemisphere.”18 Ewing intimidated from the outset, although not always in a productive way. North Carolina’s first four scores came on goaltending calls against Ewing. (Ewing illegally interfered with the ball as it was heading into the basket, something only a player of his size typically can do.) North Carolina didn’t actually put the ball into the hoop for the first eight minutes of the game.19 Ewing blocked shots, sunk free throws, and would eventually score twenty-three points. But North Carolina kept it close. With forty seconds left in the first half, Ewing raced eighty feet down the court on a fast break and slammed a dunk so thunderous that it nearly buckled the floorboards. At halftime, Georgetown led 32 to 31, a good omen. In the previous forty-three NCAA finals, the team ahead at the half had won thirty-four of them, an 80 percent success rate. During its regular season, Georgetown had a 26–1 record in games where it held a halftime lead.
Halftimes in sports represent another kind of midpoint—a specific moment in time when activity stops and teams formally reassess and recalibrate. But sports halftimes differ from life, or even project, midpoints on one important dimension: At this midpoint, the trailing team confronts harsh mathematical reality. The other team has more points. That means only matching them in the second half will guarantee a loss. The team that’s behind must now not only outscore its opponent, it must also outscore the opposition by more than the amount it’s trailing. A team ahead at halftime—in any sport—is more likely than its opponent to win the game. This has little to do with the limits of personal motivation and everything to do with the heartlessness of probability.
However, there’s an exception—one peculiar circumstance where motivation seems to trump mathematics.
Jonah Berger of the University of Pennsylvania and Devin Pope of the University of Chicago analyzed more than 18,000 National Basketball Association games over fifteen years, paying special attention to the games’ scores at halftime. It’s not surprising that teams ahead at halftime won more games than teams that were behind. For example, a six-point halftime lead gives a team about an 80 percent probability of winning the game. However, Berger and Pope detected an exception to the rule: Teams that were behind by just one point were more likely to win. Indeed, being down by one at halftime was more advantageous than being up by one. Home teams with a one-point deficit at halftime won more than 58 percent of the time. Indeed, trailing by one point at halftime, weirdly, was equivalent to being ahead by two points.20
Berger and Pope then looked at ten years’ worth of NCAA match-ups, nearly 46,000 games in all, and found the same, though somewhat smaller, effect. “Being slightly behind [at halftime] significantly increases a team’s chance of winning,” they write. And when they examined the scoring patterns in greater detail, they found that the trailing teams scored a disproportionate number of their points immediately after the halftime break. They came out strong at the start of the second half.
Truckloads of sports data can reveal correlations, but they don’t tell us anything definitive about causes. So Berger and Pope conducted some simple experiments to identify the mechanisms at work. They gathered participants and pitted each one against an opponent in another room in a contest to see who would bang out computer keystrokes more quickly. Those who scored higher than their opponents won a cash prize. The game had two short periods separated by a break. And it was during the break that experimenters treated their participants differently. They told some that they were far behind their opponent, some that they were a little behind, some that they were tied, and some that they were a little ahead.
The results? Three groups matched their first-half performance, but one did considerably better—the people who believed they were trailing by a little. “[M]erely telling people they were slightly behind an opponent led them to exert more effort,” Berger and Pope write.21
In the second half of the 1982 finals, North Carolina came out blazing with an up-tempo offense and a swarming defense. Within four minutes, the Tar Heels had overcome their deficit and opened a three-point lead. But Georgetown and Ewing fought back, and the game seesawed its way into the final minutes. With thirty-two seconds left, Georgetown had moved to a 62–61 lead. Dean Smith called a time-out, his team down by one. North Carolina inbounded the ball, made seven passes near the top of the key, and then dished the ball to the weak side of the court, where a little-known freshman guard sunk a sixteen-foot jump shot to put the Tar Heels ahead. In the remaining seconds, the Hoyas floundered. And North Carolina’s one-point halftime deficit became a one-point national championship victory.
The 1982 NCAA championship game became legendary in the annals of basketball. Dean Smith, John Thompson, and James Worthy would become three of only about 350 players, coaches, and other figures in the history of the game to earn plaques in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. And that obscure freshman who hit the game winner was named Michael Jordan, whose basketball career worked out pretty well.