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“Dr. Murray’s MPI can be and will be the next part of sports evolution in the 21st century”
Tom Flores - Super Bowl XV and XVIII Winning Head Coach
“This is a fascinating work of remarkable scope and scholarship”
Steve Sabol - President of NFL Films
From the Preface
American Football is as thrilling and beautiful a sport as was ever
played, coached, watched, or analyzed. While it showcases sheer brutality,amazing strength, raw speed, and years of refined position skill, it also requires the intelligence, decision making, and mental prowess of a chessmaster, day trader, or trial lawyer. A team sport through and through, it’s also one of great emotional intensity.
I love football so much that I made it the topic of my doctoral
dissertation on how players on a national championship football team
coped with injuries. So my first aim in this book is to share my passion
and excitement for football, the Super Bowl, and the new mega-Super
Bowl this book creates each year, with each team ranked from top to
bottom. This first task is easy as I’ve been inspired during more than 40
years as a fan, athlete, coach, and more recently as a paid consultant to
NFL, college and high school players to enhance performance. If you
love football, you will enjoy rare insights into our nation’s most popular
sport played on its biggest stage. I have meticulously studied every one of
the almost 15,000 plays in Super Bowl history and will provide these
insights while introducing the breakthrough approach to understanding
and quantifying the game that has made this possible.
America’s most beloved sportscaster, Lesley Visser, liked the idea
of this book so much that she contributed its Epilogue on the genius of
Bill Walsh and the San Francisco 49ers that I am sure you will find
fascinating. Lesley’s many accomplishments include first and only woman
assigned to a Super Bowl sideline, first assigned to Monday Night
Football and first to handle a Super Bowl trophy presentation. She is also
the first and only woman enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
She doesn’t disappoint in her chapter. Even if football is not a passion
for you as it is for Lesley and me, you will hopefully acquire a different
view on the game after reading this book.
A second and equally vital task in this book will be to introduce
the Mental Performance Index (MPI), a new quantitative way of
measuring on field performance that has undergone eight years of
successful testing and validation. I will explain why many consider the
MPI a revolutionary breakthrough in understanding football and sports
performance. The performance philosophy behind the MPI helps people
with needs far beyond the gridiron and the success of the MPI gives the
mental game a big boost. It is very hard to think of “mental” as weak
when we know how much influence it has on the biggest stage in history!
..........
As a sports psychologist paid by athletes and teams to train the
subtle mental keys to success, I find that coaches and even athletes at
times have an initial negative view about the word “psychology” as it may
elicit thoughts of poor health, weakness, or insanity. This stereotype may
come from a history of mental health care that is far from noble in the
early years, but has nothing to do with today’s positive brand of sports
psychology. As a former international athlete and coach focused on
building winning team strategies, I think we trip over labels. Psychology
is just a science suited to study human behavior and mental processes, anda profession to help people improve. Since human behavior is complex,this expertise is needed to understand and help my clients. I want people to leap out of the dark ages after reading this book and to realize that any achievement is facilitated by excelling mentally as well as physically.
I consciously went right to the top to study the NFL Super Bowl.
It was my belief that by understanding what happened on this
monumental platform, when the eyes of the world were upon players and
coaches with the greatest scrutiny, and the biggest prize loomed, we
would learn lessons of success, teamwork, and passion in whatever we are doing in life, and especially in demanding pressure situations. I studied
each play a little differently than in the past, looking not only for
traditional performance as seen in yards gained, first downs, turnovers
etc., but also for observable aspects of mental performance that could be
incorporated into the team performance ratings in a fair and balanced
way. Smart playing teams would score higher in my system. Careless
teams making mental errors (e.g., running before a catch and dropping
passes, managing the clock poorly, making careless penalties) would rate
lower on this factor than teams with fewer mental errors and superior
execution in pressure moments such as 3rd and 4th down, for example.
..........
I rated every play in Super Bowl history and the precision of the
MPI helped me more accurately determine which the best performing and
most dominant teams were. A football team coming together to win a
championship is a terrific story in itself. It creates a magnificence of spirit
and comradeship that can only be equated to the finest crack combat
force. Knowing how 88 different teams competed on Super Bowl Sunday,
I believe, also holds clues to winning more in our sports, jobs, families
and lives. You will learn how the mental game was critical in helping each
Super Bowl team win. You will realize that mental performance is always
present, either helping or hurting, and that monitoring it regularly is the
first step toward knowing what to emphasize in practice and training.
..........
In Chapter 1, I share my background and the many fascinating
experiences and people that shaped my views on sports and football and
ultimately inspired me to develop a way to measure degree of perfection
in team sport performance. I discuss the awe of discovering an historic
oversight in team performance measurement compelling me to correct it
by developing the MPI. In Chapter 2, I demonstrate how I tested my
theory that mental performance, ignored in team performance ratings, was
actually crucial to success. Signaling a paradigm shift in sports, I provide
empirical evidence that MPI scores relate to winning better than more
traditional football statistics. I explain the MPI and how it allows us to see
games more clearly than ever, revealing previously hidden elements that
allowed each winning team to raise the vaunted Lombardi Trophy. In
Chapter 3, I review every Super Bowl played, provide MPI graphs and
statistics, and show how mental performance impacted outcome. Every
Super Bowl game is placed into a single category according to how the
game was played and won using MPI data and other team performance
statistics. This meaning based grouping of games was viewed as superior
to an arbitrary chronological listing. A keen examination of what
happened in each game reveals new lessons about success for us all. In
Chapter 4, I introduce the first ever MPI Bowl with tables showing which
teams were the 32 best teams in history and on specialized categories.
Let the controversy begin. Wherever you live or whatever team you love, you might be surprised where your team ranks. Chapter 5 explores how themental game holds keys to solving many problems in today’s game.Topics include athletic counseling, mental coaching, weekly team ratings,and the advantage of scouting opponents’ MPI scores and reviewing the data frequently. Finally, Lesley Visser’s superb Epilogue gives us a unique perspective on the Super Bowl and the genius of coaching legend BillWalsh. She knew Coach Walsh well, and shares never-before-revealed secrets to his influence and success.I HOPE YOU ENJOYED THAT! YOU CAN NOW ORDER THE BOOK AT THIS LINK
John F. Murray, Ph.D.
139 North County Road, Suite 18C, Palm Beach, FL 33480
Phone: (561) 596-9898
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