Click Here to See the Archive of all 2012 MPI Reviewed Miami Dolphins and Miami Hurricanes Games

Palm Beach, FL – September 22, 2012 – John F. Murray, Ph.D. – As a South Florida born and raised sports performance psychologist in my 14th year of practice, my career entails helping athletes and teams achieve peak performance, and that often includes both NFL and division I college football players. The two biggest football shows down here are the Miami Dolphins and Miami Hurricanes football programs, and I already cover the Hurricanes in my weekly Mind Games column in the official publication for Hurricanes sports, Canesport magazine. To expand coverage, I’m excited to begin a second “Mind Games” column analyzing each play of the Miami Dolphins season with the Mental Performance Index (or MPI) that I wrote about last year in the book with the same title: “The Mental Performance Index: Ranking the Best Teams in Super Bowl History” (World Audience, 2011).

Before we get started reviewing the Miami Dolphins first two games of 2012 (a loss to the Houston Texans 30-10 and a win over the Oakland Raiders 35-13) let’s reflect on how a sports psychologist adds to our understanding and performance in football. If you read my book or the Mind Games column in Canesport, or if you tuned into one of many television or radio broadcasts before the Super Bowl over the past decade, you realize I have no interest in status quo or others’ opinions about a game. I developed the MPI to enhance team performance understanding and I march to the beat of my clients’ needs to help them mentally prepare and play smarter on game day.

The MPI includes this “smart play” or “mental performance” aspect in rating a football team’s performance. It is unique in that it captures how well a team “performs,” and that performance includes mental performance. I study each play in a game, so in this way it is a comprehensive measure of consistency of focus too. As evidenced by the analyses reported in my book, the MPI was clearly the most influential variable in winning the Super Bowl. No other statistics were as comprehensive, and none came as close to correlating with winning. Even points scored and given up took a back seat to the MPI in terms of predicting outcome. This was an exciting finding in the book, but it makes total sense.

In reviewing a football team’s performance, I lean heavily on the Mental Performance Index (MPI) combined with more traditional football statistics. Sometimes my interpretations mesh with popular opinion and sometimes not, but it does not concern me because I know that I am getting precision and accuracy, and that’s why the MPI was needed in the first place.

The MPI was born around 2002 because I was dismayed that there were no statistics showing how well a team “performed” regardless of game outcome, and none that included “mental performance” as a factor. The MPI was designed to measure both.

We knew that mental performance was crucial from the day the first cave man tried to spear a large beast to feed his village. His “smart play” or “mental performance” was often the decisive factor to his success or failure. The same holds true today in any sport. Tom Brady and Ryan Tannehill’s smarts are equally, if not more, influential to his body in playing quarterback.

Teams playing smarter football and making fewer errors receive higher MPI scores. The MPI captures talent as well as mental performance, and as such it measures the “total performance” of a team, but it is clearly NOT a measure of outcome like the score on the scoreboard. We already know the score, but the score often fails miserably in showing which team performed better, to what degree, and in which areas (defense, offense, special teams, pressure moments etc.) There are shallow victories that should have been losses, and there are frustrating losses that should have been wins. Knowing how each unit performed is the key to helping them get better each week. In this way, the MPI helps coaches and players because knowledge is power, but fans are also intrigued in knowing how their team is doing in a much more comprehensive manner.

MPI team scores are reported on a 0 to 1 scale where .500 is roughly average. This percentage score shows how close a team came to perfection in a game. So a team with an MPI total score of .567 could be said to have performed roughly at 56.7 % of perfection, and this performance will include how they executed both mentally and physically. The 3 slide video linked at the top of www.JohnFMurray.com shows how talent is far from sufficient if you want success! While the overachiever has much less raw talent, he often outperforms the underachiever due to his much greater “mental performance” and this “smart play” (just a synonym for “mental performance”) is where real strides are made. It is a more fluid factor influenced by motivation, discipline, focus, intensity, and many other factors that have mental coaching implications.

Mental coaching is how I help athletes get better. I cannot change their talent level, a more fixed commodity that changes slowly over time. We work together to achieve greater success by improving in areas such as confidence, focus, emotional control, goal setting, resilience, passion, discipline and imagery. This training helps a player execute better on game day because we have usually rehearsed performance hundreds of times in our minds before game day.

You might enjoy watching a YouTube in which I discussed this topic with NFL great Bill Romanowski behind the scenes on radio row at the Dallas Super Bowl a couple years ago. As you will see on the video, one of the NFL’s toughest players raves about the need for imagery and sports psychology for those wishing to become great. He said that imagery is what separates the “good players from the great players” So much for the stereotype of the physically dominating player denying the need for mental skills learned in mental coaching! He was doing imagery before each of those big hits, in much the same way that Miami Dolphin’s 2005 unsung hero award winner Jim “Crash” Jensen claimed that working mentally on his game is what kept him in the league 12 years. Two time Super Bowl champion coach Tom Flores called the MPI “the next great sports innovation in the 21st century.” Are we seeing a pattern?

This is all very similar to the work I have done an hour before each game the past two seasons with former Florida Panthers NHL star Olli Jokinen who recently signed a two-year, 9 million dollar, contract with the Winnipeg Jets. During our work over two years (2012-2012) he improved on all 3 measures of performance including: points, goals, and assists. His contract also went up 3 million dollars compared with the previous one with Calgary, so he improved himself financially too. The same holds for football players and teams, and I only mentioned Olli because he has been very verbal in the media in discussing our work together and encourages me to mention him. He provides an example of the value of mental coaching that I am usually unwilling to discuss due to confidentiality.

Now that you’ve been re-introduced to the idea of sports psychology and the MPI, let’s move on to the 2012 Miami Dolphins, and the inaugural season of Head Coach Joe Philbin.

I like what I have seen from Coach Philbin with his no-nonsense message of “team” and “constant improvement.” Anyone who knows me or has read my book knows that my historical passion for the Dolphins is high as a kid growing up in South Florida during the perfect season of 1972. Readers including coaches, players or management may use it as they will or ignore it. It concerns me only that I am true to the MPI and my analysis each week.
My passion as an active season ticket holder with 4 lower prime seats on the 30 yard line becomes just a little more exciting and valuable by writing this column. Maybe more people will learn about the MPI from my efforts in this column, but it is mainly a work of joy.

If you would like more materials on the MPI, please take a look at the archived column articles in Canesport.com (2011 and 2012) or get a copy of “The Mental Performance Index: Ranking the Best Teams in Super Bowl History,” but don’t be intimidated by the title. It is far from a dry book on statistics. Tom Flores wrote the foreword and there are lessons learned from each Super Bowl game that we can apply to daily life, tips on incorporating sports psychology into a football program, pro football hall of fame inductee Lesley Visser’s chapter on the genius of 49ers coach Bill Walsh, and so much more including a power ranking of each team in Super Bowl history.

MIAMI DOLPHINS MIND GAMES – WEEK 1 (2012)

Before each review, I present the most basic MPI data chart, showing the Dolphin’s total team performance (MPI-T), and performance on offense (MPI-O), defense (MPI-D), special teams (MPI-ST), offensive pressure performance (MPI-OP), defensive pressure performance (MPI-DP) and total pressure performance (MPT-TP). After showing the numbers, I will provide the most succinct analysis possible on the team’s performance, even more succinct than the writing in Canesport.

Read this column regularly, and you will soon realize that MPI scores measure what every coach, fan, player, or broadcaster really wants to know – how the team actually performed in the game regardless of score!

Game One: Houston Texans 30 Miami Dolphins 10

HOUSTON TEXANS MIAMI DOLPHINS

Offense .520 Offense .449 Defense .457 Defense .483 Special Teams .516 Special Teams .708 Pressure Offense .483 Pressure Offense .333 Pressure Defense .583 Pressure Defense .517 Total Pressure .521 Total Pressure .448

Total MPI Score .496 Total MPI Score .492

On its surface, this game might look like a Houston Texans blowout victory. With a final score of 30-10 how could one argue otherwise? This is one way the MPI helps provide a more realistic view of what happened. This was actually an extremely close game in terms of overall performance (.496 to .492 favoring Houston). The reason the final score was so different from the performance of the teams is that Houston held a 4-0 turnover advantage a large part of that was tipped balls at the line of scrimmage.

In respect to the Texans, their offense did dominate Miami’s defense (.520 to .482) and they did perform better in pressure situations (.521 to .448). Miami’s offense, however, was at about the same level as Houston’s defense (.449 to .457) and the Dolphins special teams unit destroyed the Texans special teams .708 to .516.

So while I am not going to say that the Texans did not earn this victory, it was a victory not even remotely represented by a 30-10 final score. Without that horrendous turnover disadvantage, Miami probably would have lost or won this game by 3 to 7 points and they might have even won the game with a little fortune.

Credit Matt Schaub’s nice passing day of 20/30 for 266 yards and 1 touchdown and this was the area that Houston won the game. Total yards gained was a slight advantage for Houston (337-275) and rushing yards was similar (83-79 for Houston). Miami also did themselves no favors with 7 penalties.

For the Dolphins, this was the kind of loss that – with proper MPI analysis – should have inspired the team to reduce those errors and turnovers knowing that they were actually much closer to a top team in the league in the Texans. For the Texans, they might have wanted to exercise some humility and caution in their preparation for the second game, knowing full well that they did not blow away the Dolphins in terms of performance the way the score seemed to indicate. In fact, they were almost outperformed!

Dr. John F. Murray, described as “The Freud of Football” by the Washington Post, is a South Florida native and licensed clinical and sports psychologist in Palm Beach. He provides mental coaching and sports psychology services, counseling, speeches and seminars. He recently authored his second book, “The Mental Performance Index: Ranking the Best Teams in Super Bowl History,” destroying stigmas about the mental game in sports and showing football teams how to perform better and win more games by enhancing team performance assessments and training. For further information call Dr. Murray at 561-596-9898, visit johnfmurray.com or email johnfmurray@mindspring.com.

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