Whether Lobo head coach Mike Locksley knows it, he's a psychologist at heart.
During Saturday's Cherry-Silver scrimmage, the UNM football team reinforced the findings of renowned psychologist Robert Zajonc, who in 1965 accounted for the duality of the social-facilitation effect.
In 1898, Norman Triplett coined the phrase "social facilitation" after performing experiments in which he found that children performed tasks better when they were paired together than when they were alone.
Triplett, who was a biking enthusiast, got the idea after he noticed that bicyclists who raced in groups typically clocked faster times than bikers who simply raced against the clock. He concluded that the existence of a co-actor, another contestant competing in the race, served "to liberate latent energy not ordinarily available."
But some research proved otherwise. And in certain cases, people's performances, particularly when the subject was a novice at the task, were actually inhibited by the presence of others.
Former coach Rocky Long inhibited his players' performance - but it wasn't because of his presence. It was the format in which he ran his scrimmages.
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In last year's scrimmage at Ivan Head Stadium in Santa Fe, Cherry smothered Silver to the tune of 35-7.
That's because Long sorted through his spring roster and stacked the Cherry team with starters, depleting the Silver team and leaving them to compete with backups.
It showed. Silver, composed of inferior players, was bullied into submission.
"The positive is that we put the first team against everybody else, and obviously the first team is much better than the rest of them," Long said at the conclusion of last year's scrimmage. "The red offense looked really good, and the red defense looked very good."
That didn't happen during this year's scrimmage. Instead, Silver pulled out a 24-21 win. And wide receiver Roland Bruno explained why.
"(Locksley) did a good job of splitting up the teams to make it evenly matched," said Bruno, who took reps with both Cherry and Silver squads. "That's why it came down to being a close game."
But it also has to do with the concept of social facilitation.
Long never made sure the teams were even. Locksley did.
And doesn't it seem more beneficial to do what Locksley did - evenly disperse talent?
Yes, and here's why.
According to UNM associate professor of psychology David Witherington, if replacements - Zajonc's equivalent of novices - are paired with starters - Zajonc's equivalent of experts - the starters will "facilitate" the performance of the replacements more so than grouping backups with backups.
"Surrounding a novice with experts should facilitate a novice's performance more than surrounding a novice with other novices, so long as the experts don't play too far beyond the novice's optimal level," Witherington said in an e-mail. "The experts, if they handle things properly, should provide a scaffolding which will bootstrap the novice's performance to a higher level."
Why didn't Long do that? Quarterback Tate Smith admitted he didn't have an answer.
"I think Rocky wanted to show who the starters were," Smith said. "He (was) the head coach. He's going to call his guys how he wants to be called and coach Locks is going to do it the way he wants things done."
Bruno said Long couldn't satisfy two talented squads because of issues relating to depth. But the Lobos entered last year's spring camp with more players on their roster (86) than they broke camp with this year (80).
"It would be offense versus defense instead of Cherry versus Silver," Bruno said.
As the season proved, that helped nobody.
When Donovan Porterie was injured four games into the season, Brad Gruner wasn't experienced enough to fill in and lead the Lobos to a respectable .500 season. The starters, too, weren't tested enough in spring training. A lack of competition in the annual Cherry-Silver game softened the Lobos. And when the starters faced opponents that punched back when UNM punched, the Lobos were only able to handle that type of pressure four times.
"In a lot of situations, the defense would be getting stops and we couldn't do anything on offense, so it wasn't a way for us to win," Bruno said. "No matter how much they would stop them, we wouldn't score. That would hurt us."
In other words, nobody improved from Long's one-sided spring scrimmage spanking festival. The only thing it facilitated was a 4-8 season.
On Saturday, that wasn't the case. Cornerback Anthony Hooks said Locksley balanced the talent scale.
"There wasn't really an edge," said Hooks, who didn't participate in last year's spring scrimmage. "Each team just had fun."
And you don't have to ask a psychologist what having fun does for a person's confidence.
Or playing free of tiered first-team, second-team labels.
"I don't know what the second-team defense is," Locksley said. "I haven't named first or second team. I don't have a second team."
Just one unit.
