Somewhere buried in the bowels of cognition, there is a reason the UNM women’s basketball team can’t, for the life of them, beat Utah.
Since the sport is amicable to ambiguity, it takes a locksmith to unlock the adjoining corridors of brain, behavior and basketball, an area that is neither strictly qualitative nor quantitative, though box scores attempt to crystallize the narratives of games through basic statistical lenses.
If such were the case on Saturday against Utah, the UNM women’s basketball team shot 23.1 percent from the field in the second half and attempted nine less free throws.
Meanwhile, the Utes shot 40 percent from the field in the second half and made four more free throws than the Lobos.
So there you have it.
Well, no, not really. In any case, it is sometimes warranted to be child-like in our line of questioning. When all else fails, ask why.
Why, on the last four occasions, have the Lobos lost by a combined total of seven points? Why, with or without Amy Beggin, can’t UNM overcome and triumph?
Do the Utes have a psychological edge over UNM in tight-knit, end-game situations? Nobody seemed to have a valid answer.
“No, I don’t think they do,” said guard Amanda Best. “I think we played really hard. We played really good defense. We shut down a lot of their key players, held them under their averages, but we just didn’t finish on the offensive end.”
Same question to Utes’ head coach Elaine Elliott.
“Did you ask them? I don’t know how they feel about it,” she said. “I think they probably think they can beat us every time they play us.”
Think, of course, being the key word here.
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Regarding the question, Lobo head coach Don Flanagan came closest, insinuating something more far-reaching is in play than a box score could suggest.
“I don’t know as to what our kids’ feelings are,” he said. “I would think they’d be quite motivated to play against Utah. But, down the stretch, they’ll make a shot and we won’t.”
It was last year, at home.
With Flanagan’s 300th win on the line, the Lobos held a 50-45 lead over the Utes with 1:23 left in the game. Then it all unraveled — and, as Saturday proved, the Lobos have yet to spindle the long-running yarn.
An 8-0 burst by the Utes, including a running, game-winning 3-pointer by Morgan Warburton, put Utah ahead for good.
Subsequently, the Lobos’ next loss to Utah on March 4 took, more or less, the same predictable twists and turns: the Lobos down three points, Beggin with another desperation shot, but the constant variable — another loss.
All this, though, came to a head at the Mountain West Conference Tournament.
Looking to redeem herself, Beggin had an opportunity to put the Lobos up three in the waning seconds of the semifinals of the MWC Tournament, but inexplicably the 88 percent free-throw shooter watched both her attempts rim out. At the other end, Morgan Warburton sunk a running floater, propelling the Utes to an 56-55 victory.
The trend is well-documented.
In sinister fashion, UNM traveled on Jan. 12 to face a depleted Utah squad, one who had lost Warburton to graduation.
The results, however, were painfully familiar. UNM mysteriously couldn’t hit a shot the entire second half, going 3-of-28, 0-of-7 in the last three minutes, and allowing Utah to stage a comeback after being down as much as 14 in the first half. End result: 46-40 Utes.
Fast-forward to Saturday.
Tied at 49 apiece, forward Jessica Kielpinski missed a five-foot layup with 38 seconds left, and, like always, the Lobos were members of a bereaved club.
In the most primitive sense, Brandi Fink, a clinical psychologist and UNM research scholar, said the Lobos could potentially chalk up their struggles against Utah to a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”
The grounds for the self-fulfilling prophecy are based on positive feedback, or a “relationship between belief and behavior,” said David Witherington, UNM associate professor of psychology.
Explaining how we conceptualize behavior, Fink said behavior is looked at in an A-B-C pattern, where A is the antecedent of the behavior, B is the behavior exhibited and C is the consequence of the behavior.
Or in basketball terms, since the three previous games were decided by a combined seven points, UNM expected the game to be close (the antecedent). That being the case, the Lobos played in a fashion conditioned to suit hotly contested games (the behavior), and, in the end, lost (the consequence).
“It is possible that the Lady Lobos’ first loss to Utah set the stage for their subsequent losses,” Fink said in an e-mail on Saturday. “Utah has become an antecedent for positive punishment and may signal something like, ‘When we’ve been in this situation before, we played as hard as we could and we still lost.’”
Fink said it’s entirely possible that the players aren’t even aware that they’re engaging in such behavior.
“Even though the brain is involved in all of these behavioral steps, one does not need to be overtly conscious of it for it to be occurring,” she said. “We don’t have to engage in any self-talk or verbal behavior with ourselves to have these processes playing themselves out, although doing so sometimes amplifies the consequence.”
Alternatively, Witherington said he’d need definite evidence to conclude that was the case.
“The fact that they’ve lost by such a close margin wouldn’t necessarily suggest they believe they’ll lose,” Witherington said. “They could just as readily believe that they’re always close enough to win.”
Loosely tied to self-fulfilling prophecy is the idea of trauma serving as a cue to bringing past experiences to the forefront of a person’s brain, thereby affecting their mood state.
On the issue of whether close losses constitute a less taxing level of trauma, Witherington said events aren’t inherently traumatic.
“It all depends on how the individual appraises the event in terms of their beliefs, desires and goals,” he said. “For some people, a close loss hurts the most — it’s easier to be blown out. For others, a close loss could signal a lesser trauma.”
Whether the Lobos are cognizant of it, there is something psychologically amiss when Utah is on the itinerary.
