The Hare Was An Idiot

Be a Better Front-Runner

Mark Brown

February 16, 2023

The story of the race between the tortoise and the hare is a very old story, by contemporary standards. It is a very basic one that reinforces that importance of never stopping movement towards the goal. There is a lot more to get out of it than just a beware the consequences of arrogance. That’s not even my lead takeaway from the story. That would be that hare was a terrible front-runner. We have seen tremendous performances in athletic events from both the front-runner and chase positions. The latter tends to get the most of the attention because it tends to coincide with an underdog role. When a team goes starts to fall behind, they become the underdog in the game, regardless of the role they had going into it. People say they love to underdogs but anyone with a brain would rather play from ahead or their favorite team or athlete. It’s just a more advantageous position. It’s never necessary to start losing to start giving more or better effort. There are ways to play from ahead that don’t involve losing that competitive edge that got people there in the first place. The story of tortoise and the hare is much more than how conceited behavior leads to negative consequences.

Front-running is an important skill to develop for both life and competition. The concept can go by many names and anachronisms. “Closer,” “knowing how to shut the door,” “putting the foot on the neck,” “running the opponent out of the building”, and numerous other things said by broadcasters during sporting events are all ways front-running is referred to. The ability to play from ahead is something I take very seriously when I am at work. I know at any point in the day something catastrophic can happen to any of the equipment that I am dependent on to complete the tasks I am assigned to do. The ability to learn how to play the game from ahead helps mitigate possible distractions and breakdowns. My experience with it makes me value the grind and the need to constantly be getting something productive done more than anything else. This is ultimately what the hare gets gets wrong by stopping and smelling the roses, so to speak, during the story. Once the race has started, whatever that happens to be, stopping is not allowed. Keep eyes on the prize. Good front-runners never forget the goal, which is a lot easier to do than it sounds like it should. Sometimes it gets met and other time it doesn’t. Some of that comes from failing to play from ahead well and some from blatant dumb luck that can’t be accounted for ahead of time.

The temptation to stop, take a look around, taunt the opponent, play to the crowd, take in the environment, etc before the race or gamer has been won is great. It’s that way more than ever because people are encouraged to be more mindful of their surroundings than when I was growing up. I’ve heard countless athletes talk about how they never stopped to smell the roses during their careers because it’s too hard to do that and compete at the same time. As a result, players, especially professional athletes, build better relationships with their peers after the careers are done. They simply didn’t have the time and/or energy to be able to spend with them. Competition is a cruel mistress. Sports is where dreams literally compete with each other on the field, race track, or wherever competitions are held for dominance. Want to be the best? Something has to get sacrificed. Odds are one of things to get the guillotine is relationships with people on the fringes of one’s circle of friends. This is as true for athletes as it is people who work regular paying jobs. Being prepared for the next work day is important, so even when being off the clock it’s advantageous to be in front of what could be. This is part of why the importance of sleep is being hammered into our heads by everyone in the medical field and by the athletes we watch on television. There’s no stopping and relaxing, but one can’t afford to be slow either. Consistent success comes from kicking ass all the damned time, even in the slower moments.

Focused effort is what is required to make sure that strides forward can be maintained on a daily basis. The most important thing to develop from the daily improvement is confidence. When people talk about “momentum” being lost in a game, it’s much more a case of confidence in the ability to win that day than anything else. Sometimes that feeling will linger into the days, weeks or even months that follow a particular outcome. It’s why the “burn the tape” approach has to be applied sometimes. The ability to maintain a high confidence level is what separates people who are good at front-running and those who aren’t used to doing it. The yo-yo effect is real and it is quite difficult to overcome. There’s no shortage of doubts that come through. I face them every time I go the gym for a lifting session. Pushing to the limits of what can be on done on a particular day is necessary. I can’t just not do it because I don’t “have it” that day. Confidence is important because it is central to allowing people to put their best effort forward. It’s startlingly easy to see when confidence is starting to wane. The gestures by individuals or teams directly tied to the results of a play are easy to pick up on. Effort, the thing that less skilled people use to catch up to those more skilled, becomes a casualty when confidence is lost. That can be seen in a variety of ways. Most of it is a lack of hustle and/or attentiveness. It’s evidence the mind and body aren’t working together.

Skilled front-runners have the ability to impose their will on the world around them. This is more apparent in athletes than any other place because of the nature of how sports competitions are organized and viewed around the world. It certainly isn’t limited to athletic fields, though. I recognize it at work all the time. Being a good front-runner is a part of becoming a good leader. The ability to bring everybody’s level up to complete a team based task is all about keeping confidence high. People’s effort level decreases or disappears altogether when confidence gets lost. This works the other way as well. When facing an opponent, the goal is to cut their confidence to the point that they quit competing so hard. In this way, the goal is to create multiple foes for the opponent. This is the most common root cause of a momentum shift in a game.When the wave hits hard enough, the opponent’s will to fight can be extinguished entirely. Even highly competitive athletes with stories to corroborate reputed psychopathic work ethic can be brought to heel. I watched the Boston Celtics kill Kobe Bryant’s competitive will in the 2008 finals and LeBron James’ in the 2010 playoffs. No one is immune to having their confidence wilted right in front of their own eyes. This happens in professional golf tournaments every week. People watching can see the golfers understand the moment they can’t win the tournament but can make the most amount of money they can.

More college football games see this willpower destruction happen then NFL games, but I can definitely think of some from both levels that stick out. The 2014 Rose Bowl featuring Oregon and Florida State in the semi final of the initial College Football Playoff was a game that showed how front-running is done. Oregon took Florida State’s heart early in the game then submitted them. Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, and Clemson have done this a lot over the last 10-13 years. I was always keenly aware of the scores of the games when Iowa State played Nebraska because I grew up in central Iowa in the 1980s and 90s. The latter stomped multiple muddles in the former, sometimes to the tune of 70 point victories. The talent gap between elite college football programs and ones below it can create atmospheres that make games like the 2014 Rose Bowl a regular occurrence at the FBS level. Georgia’s 2023 college football playoff road shows this very distinctly. Ohio State was a physical, emotional, and mental match for for them. TCU wasn’t. The games showed that.

NFL games are generally tighter that their college football counterparts. It’s one of the most fascinating things about watching them on Sundays, or whenever they get held. I have mentioned to a friend at work about how crazy the games feel when watching, especially the games that feel like blowouts but turn out to be a 1 score or barely over in the final score. That’s significant because it means that the games come down to just a few decisions by everyone involved. Becoming a better front-runner is a much more important skill to develop here because that talent gap is oftentimes minuscule. One of the best NFL games to see the effect of good front-running is the 59-0 beatdown by the New England Patriots put on the Tennessee Titans in 2009. It is one of the most instructive games to watch. It could have easily been one of those 77-0 or worse massacres that is sometimes seen in college football. Tom Brady threw 6 touchdowns, 5 of them in the second quarter alone, en route to a 45-0 halftime score in the snow. The Patriots scored on their first 2 drives after halftime then pulled the starters and the game went on for another couple uneventful hours until the game was mercifully over. What’s most fascinating to me for the purposes of this essay is how easily this could have been the biggest blowout in NFL history had Bill Belichick, the head coach of New England, wanted to rain points on the Titans like a college football coach intent on impressing poll voters. In a vacuum, this game stands out from the other big blowouts that happen occasionally during the season. That first half was something special. It shows why the hare was an idiot. One can only stop in the middle of the race when they have taken the opponent’s heart and made them quit the race. Good front-runners make people quit competing.

This understanding becomes more obvious when watching games and competitions where that doesn’t happen. Behind becoming the victim of any big comeback in any game or contest is a failure to destroy the opponent’s confidence level. In all of these comebacks, there are a cascading series of effects that stem from the failure I just mentioned. If the opponent starts to see success and is allowed to keep happening, their energy level increases dramatically. Anyone’s confidence level is easy to identify because their energy level correlates to it very well. “Energy” in this case usually indicated by the amount of effort anyone gives in whatever they are doing. Therefore, effort level derives straight from confidence level. What happens when the opponent starts to develop confidence in their abilities at the start of a comeback is that the team or player getting come back on starts to doubt their own ability. What’s important to note here is that this happens at all levels of effort. So much of what makes athletes special is the ability to be instinctive and react to uncertain situations in the moment with conviction and intelligence. Doubt and/or lack of confidence creates an environment where that doesn’t happen. One of the most popular way of phrasing it is that someone is suffering “paralysis by analysis.” The effect of doubt on decision making, especially in sports that dominantly involve zero sum consequences, can’t be overstated. That’s why confidence can’t be allowed to slip when involved in a competition.

There are tons of games across all sports every year in which big comebacks are made but the one that stands out as a shining lesson of why killing the opponent’s confidence level is so important is Super Bowl 51, played in February of 2017. It’s the game that defined the last third of Tom Brady’s career. Down 28-3 in the after the Atlanta Falcons first drive of the third quarter, he led the Patriots to a 34-28 overtime victory. What’s particularly interesting about this game to me is that anyone watching can see the effects of the Patriots confidence rising in the second half on Atlanta Falcons players and coaching staff. Brady was known for never being out of a game but coming back from this deficit in a Super Bowl was unprecedented so game narrative and situation were all blending together to create this comeback. When someone as credentialed as Brady is in the rear view mirror, suppressing his confidence level is the best anyone will do. That’s why I have heard him and the Patriots teams of the 2000 and 2010s referred as being the sports allegory for horror movie villains like Jason Vorhees. It’s a remarkably accurate comparison. After the Falcons scored to make it 28-3, the general consensus from those watching was the game was over. Jason was dead. Then he just got back up to start killing people again because that’s what he does.

Some of the statistics in this game are kind of mind blowing. The Falcons defense faced 94 plays, all told. That’s modern college football territory. NFL teams rarely come close to that number of offensive snaps in any given game, much less the most important one of the season. It is ultimately the biggest reason why they lost the game. Falcons defensive players were just gassed. I can tell anyone from experience in the gym that when the body gets pushed past it’s physical limit, it just doesn’t respond as effectively or efficiently. It wouldn’t be any different on a football field. What led to that workload for the Atlanta defense is decisions that were made by the offensive coaching staff and player that executed them on the field. A 28-3 lead with 22 minutes of game time left creates unique time sensitive situations for each team. For the Falcons, they merely needed to get the game to 0:00 on the game clock. The Patriots needed to force mistakes and capitalize on every single one of them in a timely manner to even have a chance to win. The challenge for the Falcons in this case was that typical strategy involved in burning clock would have involved them changing the personality of their offense, which was a dynamic downfield passing game highlighted by wide receiver Julio Jones. After the game, then offensive coordinator and current 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan defended his play calling by stating the runs they attempted, which is standard strategy for teams with big leads, failed so he just stuck with what they were best at. The Falcons inability to deliver the kill shot when they needed to do so cannot be understated.

This game also shows everyone watching something about being a front-runner in the lead of a game or competition in a much higher level of doubt. In these kinds of games, each individual decision can lead directly to victory or defeat. Being able to adjust to any given circumstance in the moment and make the decision that makes situational sense will probably end up being the difference in the game. Belichick often talks about the importance of complementary football. That means being able to protect the defense from getting worn down by being able to sustain drives, putting the opponent in adverse field positions, forcing decisions to be made via game situation, and so many other things I could list. Maintaining confidence will keep the effort level high mentally, emotionally and physically. Slipping in any one of those areas may well be enough to lose the game, race or competition if the opponent is able to capitalize on it. That’s what New England did in Super Bowl 51. Yes, there will be times when one will be competing with someone whose talent wins out. If it does happen, the person who lost can at least hold their head high, look in the mirror and tell themselves they did the absolute best they could. It helps build the drive, determination and discipline of both the winner and the loser. The latter knows what they have to do improve while the former knows what they need to do to stay on top.

The story of the race between the tortoise and the hare is one about how to be a bad front-runner and the importance of maintaining confidence and effort throughout the competition. This lesson can be applied to every day life just as easily as it can be to any race, game or competition. Daily improvement is about being better today than one was yesterday. Developing the front-runner skill allows someone to put their best foot forward confidently and get the benefits from it. Life is a constant test that needs to be met with conviction. Don’t be the hare and stop to rest in the middle of the race when the opponent hasn’t quit yet. Just understand there are consequences for never stopping.