Disclaimer: this post is a freaking book; remember no one forced you to read it. Additionally, I'm no genius, so this is just one regular guy's attempt to make sense of the board-wide meltdown that predictably occurs every time BYU loses, or Bronco has a press conference. Personally, I'm a little tired of it, and it bugged me enough to do some thinking about it.

In a place called Cougarboard, it would seem to me that the majority of posts, even when things are bad, would be generally supportive of the team. I do recognize that posters are self-selected; the supportive majority is not likely to take the time to post when the team loses, so the posters tend to be quite negative in the main. Still, any supportive post is generally met with derision. This can degenerate into a season-long miasma where it becomes impossible to say anything positive about anyone or anything Cougar without a hailstorm of criticism. Given that BYU pretty much doesn't have any team that loses more than it wins, this seems a little irrational, and I'll admit it bugs me - and that I participate in it occasionally.

Thinking about it, I came up with a loose framework that helps me understand and more constructively deal with the bitterness that accompanies a loss, and even occasionally engage in productive conversations with people that are great BYU fans, but seem to be relentlessly negative about the team and the staff and the administration, to the point that they don't seem to be rooting for the team at all.

It looks like this: for purposes of this framework, there are two ways to look at any game. One is as an evaluation of the team's quality; the other is reward-based, whether the team did or did not obtain all that could be obtained from the game. [Note: I know there are others; entertainment value of the team's play is one such, but for purposes of this post, I'm ignoring those, because the division on the board tends to follow the two paradigms above.] Depending on which of the two methods people use, you can get very different attitudes about any game, and I do mean ANY game (there is one exception, which I'll address below), to the point that you can get - and we do get - heated arguments between BYU fans who aren't really talking to each other, but are at cross-purposes from the word go.

Let's use the framework on BYU's trip to Maui as an example.

If you use the rewards lens, the trip was a failure. BYU played two D1 programs and lost to both of them (no reward), thereby forfeiting any possible seeding boost down the road for the NCAAs, and even throwing a tourney trip into some doubt. The only reward was a win over Chaminade and game experience, which is pitiful. Therefore, for those that use this lens, the trip was as bad as could be, a flat disappointment in every respect. It could only have been worse had BYU lost to Chaminade.

If you use the evaluative lens, the trip was very instructive and useful. BYU essentially got two draws with teams that are a combined 10-2 on the season, one of which is ranked in the top 20 and looks very like it deserves to be. Given that BYU lost a huge chunk of its offense from last year (and arguably a good deal of its defense as well), it was very useful to see how the team dealt with a long, athletic team in SDSU and a team with a huge frontcourt in Purdue. One bounce in each game, and BYU wins; the games were essentially tossups, and winning and losing more reflective of luck (including officiating subjectivity) than design.

There were a number of negatives, of course; BYU had trouble defending the post and containing dribble penetration, didn't shoot especially well down the stretch of either close game, and had periods where scoring was hard to come by. The first halves of both games saw BYU get hurt on the boards. Free throw shooting continues to be an issue. Fischer, in particular, needs to understand when to hoard and expend energy; blowing out Chaminade is fun, but not if it means you're going to go 2-for-9 the next day. The team needs another option for scoring, preferably something down low from the frontcourt. There wasn't much evidence of it.

There were, though, some positives. Haws is a more reliable scorer than he was last year; those were two likely tourney teams, SDSU in particular showed what it can do against quality scorers, essentially erasing Utah's Wright until the game was out of reach, and Haws was able to hurt them repeatedly, including a big triple that sent the game into overtime. Fischer is erratic, but generally doesn't take bad shots out of the offense; it helps that he doesn't have the ball in his hands all that much. Even when the big men get in foul trouble, BYU does not get dominated underneath. The depth there is impressively better than last year, and in the second halves of both games BYU was able to hold its own against good rebounding teams. Winder was terrific every time he got on the floor, on both ends. Collinsworth looks at least most of the way back; even his free-throw shooting isn't nearly the cesspool it was last season. The team doesn't turn the ball over, either. Neilson can play some on both ends. BYU got to play one game almost exclusively zone, and one game man-to-man, which shows versatility and is great for later in the year.

By that measure, the trip was useful, much more useful than three blowouts would have been. By the evaluative measure, the worst game of the tournament was the only one BYU won.

So Fan A comes on the board and says "this team sucks." He's using the reward lens. He's correct, by that measurement, if a little hyperbolic. Fan B says "relax, it's a long season." He's using (at least mainly) the evaluative measure. He's also correct - six games into the year we've learned quite a bit about the team, things that will help BYU get better. But then Fan A says "you're just happy with mediocrity" and Fan B says "you're not even a fan, as negative as you are" and we have a 30-post flame war from both sides. It's a little stupid, but most of the time I think both posters mean well; they're just talking about different measurements for the team.

This shows up most violently on CB when we're talking about Bronco Mendenhall. Bronco is entirely an evaluative-model coach. He doesn't look, so far as I can tell, at the rewards model at all. Winning and losing don't seem to matter much; he's almost entirely concerned about the evaluation. [Note: there are arguments to be made that his evaluative model is broken; I have some sympathy with this argument, but this isn't the post for that.] Football fans in general tend to be much more results-driven rather than evaluative, mostly, I think, because of the scarcity of games. When you only get 12 games a season, winning as many of them as you can becomes quite a big deal. Too, college football's reward system is as insane as it's possible to imagine, and has been for a generation, being subjectively determined by people with no love for BYU (and some antipathy) or any other program not one of the elite powers. The rewards aren't necessarily directly connected to wins and losses, either, but to program prestige, "the eye test", and scoreline, putting huge pressure on teams not just to win, but to do so perfectly, a nearly impossible task. College football makes reward-modelers perpetually unsatisfied; there is always something the team could do to more thoroughly impress the "voters", whichever they are this time. Winning 45-17 is great, unless it could have been 52-3, except for the last 5 minutes of garbage time.

So when Bronco says "the season is already a success", he's using an evaluative model, where he's looking not just at on-field performance but player development and character. This drives a large chunk of the fanbase absolutely around the bend (I freely admit, it does me, too). This kind of model leaves him open to rampant criticism that he's not focused enough on football (possibly true - I think this is a legitimate subject for discussion), that he's too easily satisfied (this, however, strikes me as unlikely), and that he's satisfied with mediocrity (again, I doubt it). The language he uses says to rewards-modelers that his priorities are out of wack and that he's too soft. They like yellers. They like coaches that get in the faces of their players and scream at officials and go to press conferences and say "that was totally unacceptable, and we'll be walking home instead of riding the bus, the better for us to focus on our many, many faults". They want results (and hellfire, if they don't get them). If they get them, they'll be okay with whatever the coach says (Nick Saban says almost the same things Bronco does, but for the most part he gets a pass, because his team is winning, never mind that he's got a permanent rotating NFL farm club in Tuscaloosa and BYU has 73 married players with accounting degrees). If not, they want someone's head. I say "they", but I mean "we", a very large percentage of the time.

My advice to Bronco (and to any coach) would be to rewards model in public and evaluative model in private. It's better PR. I'd absolutely tell my players not to listen to one thing I say in front of a camera or a microphone, because it's all about telling the fans what they want to hear. Fans are about rewards. Improvement is almost irrelevant. The payoff for fans is winning games, and to a slightly lesser extent to be able to lord that winning over someone else whose opinion matters (this is a moving target; routinely fans consider opponents worthy only until their team beats them, then they weren't that good. You can see this here on the board all the time. It also changes generationally, which is why Oklahoma State fans are bitterly disappointed in this year's team, even though 20 years ago just making a bowl game was worthy of song. It does make it hard to be very happy very much of the time). That's all the payoff there is. The only evaluation - this is reinforced by sports commentators, who focus on all the good of the winner and all the bad of the loser, never mind that the two teams played 45 minutes dead even, suggesting that there perhaps are almost equal numbers of good and bad about both - is whether the team wins or loses, and in college football whether that win advances the possibility of reaching some arbitrarily-given reward, like an NY6 bowl.

In the world at large, this is wildly irrational. There aren't wins and losses in the same clear-cut way. Did you "win" today as a father? How could you tell? Most of us don't see scoreboards at all, and if we do, they're subjectively determined (profitability? Only important if you're not public; if you are, the measure is "did we do better than people thought we would?") We have to use a more evaluative model or go insane. If we end up coaches, we also have to do this. Winning and losing matters - else why keep score - but not very much. There are not a lot of championships in the most prevalent level of sports, and even where there are, what do those championships mean? Dicky-bird. [Note: this objection can be raised just as easily at any level of sports, and when there is rioting and widespread unease, it is, and deserves to be. Still, this is a sports post, and the assumption is that winning means something.]

So what's a fan to do? It seems to me there are a couple of answers to this question. One, fans need to realize that their rooting or not for a team has nothing - at all - to do with whether the team wins or loses. It's fairly simple to demonstrate this, actually. Periodically, teams get to play at home with no fans (or with almost no fans), and the home-court advantage applies even with no fan support. Fans make NO DETECTABLE DIFFERENCE to a team's performance. There's an argument to be made that money for facilities matters; the advantage there is negligible, and at the level of fan-dom represented on Cougarboard, it's nonexistent. So we're just doing what we're doing here for our own amusement.

Two, the coaching staff isn't made up of fans, and our attitude doesn't represent, echo, or reflect theirs. We see, as fans, almost none of the actual coaching that happens. Nor do public statements have anything to do with that attitude or the effectiveness or otherwise of a coach. Their mission is different from the mission of the fan, and should be, especially at BYU.

Three, even if we were to make the somewhat ridiculous assumption that our own attitude means one blessed thing to the actual performance of the team, the question remains: in what way would we get the best results, by focusing on the results, or focusing on the process and evaluating our improvement? Here we have research, and the research is unequivocal that best results are obtained by the latter focus. There isn't any doubt about it. All of the best coaches in every sport will tell you this. John Wooden is a simple example; his coaching philosophy is entirely process and evaluation and zero focus on results. Nick Saban, Phil Jackson, Greg Popovich, Rick Pitino - you name him, he's an evaluator and process-focused coach, not a results guy. This holds true in business, and in parenting, and everywhere else. It's an eternal principle, too, if you need further corroboration. Improvement is more rapid with forgiveness, persuasion and encouragement than from yelling, screaming, and punishment, even when we're talking about our own selves.

This doesn't mean that these coaches compromise and settle for less; it does mean that they are unlikely to be sufficiently negative to satisfy the fans. As fans, though, if we're trying to get the best performance from our team, we'll get it by complimenting Nate Austin's hustle than by benching him because he hedged too hard. Even when he does it for the sixteenth time. I do know that sounds wrong, and even feels wrong. Really, I do. But the research isn't particularly arguable. Google "rewards versus punishment" for a wide sample of the studies that have been done. There isn't one - not ONE - that shows criticism and punishment to be more effective than gentle persuasion and love unfeigned in getting performance to improve. Most BYU fans should understand this. It seems we don't (and I do mean WE - I'm as bitter about Chase Fischer's losing the ball on that blocked shot as anyone). The hilarious irony of this is that it is the FORGIVING fan that is LEAST "settling for mediocrity". Bitterly critical "realistic" fans are the ones more likely to be hurting the team's chances of getting better.

Four, for almost every fan in every sport, results focus is going to mean heartbreak and disappointment and frustration and pain and suffering, far, far more than the reverse. Half the teams will lose; that's axiomatic. But the winning fans will routinely fail to have achieved all they might have; at the very least, the large-scale rewards for winning will be in doubt, and far away, so the anxiety over what remains to be won will temper or even erase the joy of winning right now. In short, being rewards-focused is a miserable way to live, in sports and everywhere else. It's irrational and stupid. We all do it anyway; I'm as guilty of it as anyone. We create for ourselves a literal no-win situation, in which wins are the expected minimum and losses are unforgivable. It's such a crappy framework for living. It leads to burnout and misery. I dearly wish I would stop. A "moral victory" isn't a bad thing; it's the only kind of victory that has any value. We do ourselves and others a disservice when we denigrate the team for playing very hard in a losing effort, almost as much as we do when we celebrate a team winning with sloppy, inconsistent play. Every victory should be moral; some losses are better than wins. Yes, even in sports.

At the very least, I've been able to realize that I'm doing nothing positive AT ALL with complaining about being offsides on the kickoff. I am not affecting the team's performance. If I am, I am not making it better. If I am making it better, I'm doing it more slowly than I could be if I were positive. There are NO BENEFITS to a rewards focus. There is, in fact, only one time per season that the evaluators and the rewarders come together in peace and harmony, and that is in the championship game. There's nothing to evaluate (well, there is, just ask a Buffalo Bills fan), and the reward is immediate and tangible. Just win. It's a binary equation - one or zero, win or lose, champion or not-champion. But since only two teams, out of hundreds, are going to get to that position even to have a chance to win one, it's a poor thing to set up as a standard for happiness.

I hope this helps. If you read this far, I admire you. I truly am grateful for this community, and I have the greatest respect for those BYU fans that are part of it, no matter which paradigm they use.