How do Ohio State football players bounce back after making mistakes?

The ability to quickly move on is not exclusive to athletes. It’s just that the negative impact of not doing so is more immediate in a stadium, arena or on a playing field.

Dwell on a missed tackle or dropped pass one second longer than you should and you risk cascading into another missed tackle and dropped pass moments later. In sports, the past absolutely impacts the present and future. Sometimes for better. Often for worse.

Learning to move on from a mistake is part psychological trick, part emotional hardwiring. It’s in the DNA. Self-confidence is instrumental in taming negative thinking. Some athletes have more belief in their abilities than others, making it easier to quickly bounce back from bad plays. For some, it takes more time. The demons of discouragement and despair are not easily cast into the abyss.

Where things get tricky, at least in team sports, is that one poor performance affects the group. In football, 10 players doing their job up to spec is not good enough. If the 11th player throws an interception, the walls cave in.

Ohio State is 7-1 and No. 2 in the first College Football Playoff rankings entering Saturday’s game against Purdue. The Buckeyes’ goal is to win a national championship. The path toward that destination will include more bumpy terrain. Fumbles. Missed blocks. Drive-killing penalties.

How far OSU advances into December and January partly depends on how well players bounce back from those miscues. Too often, toughness is considered only physical, when mental recovery is the better measure.

With that in mind, I spoke with four Ohio State players about how they leave the painful past in the past. Each of the four has experienced moments of anguish. Here is how they moved on.

Ohio State Buckeyes cornerback Denzel Burke (10) celebrates a tackle of Nebraska Cornhuskers wide receiver…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/ohio-state-football-players-bounce-110610175.html

Author : The Columbus Dispatch

Publish date : 2024-11-08 11:06:10

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