 |
| PHOTO: BOB |
“I’ve never met a player,” said teammate Marial Shayok, “who yawns on a consistent basis.”
This is how one of college basketball’s best players gets ready for games: He yawns. It’s a habit that Virginia fans have begun anticipating and some of Brogdon’s teammates have seen so often that they barely notice anymore. The first time Shayok witnessed it, however, he couldn’t believe his eyes. “I thought it was an accident, and then I kept seeing him do it,” he said. “I thought he wasn’t napping before games.”
But yawning has helped turn Brogdon into the Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year and the leading scorer on a Virginia team that started the NCAA tournament with a 81-45 win over Hampton on Thursday.
He is the school’s most essential basketball player since Ralph Sampson. In the last three seasons, Virginia has upended the ACC, earning two No. 1 seeds in the NCAA tournament while knocking off Duke and North Carolina for the league’s regular season and tournament championships—which makes it even more unusual that Brogdon begins games by unleashing an epic yawn. “It lets all my nerves out,” he said. “I can relax and focus in.”
Yawning is involuntary. Brogdon has been doing it since high school, but it caused problems when he started playing college basketball, where an untimely yawn is all it takes to put a down payment on a seat at the end of the bench. Brogdon let one slip during a game when he was a freshman, and he still remembers Virginia coach Tony Bennett’s reaction. “He actually got on me pretty hard when we were in the huddle,” Brogdon said.
After the game, though, Brogdon’s mother spoke with Bennett. She helped explain that he wasn’t yawning because he was bored. He was yawning because it was his way of calming down. “She told him it’s a habit,” Brogdon said, “and it was going to continue.”
But sometimes a yawn is not just a yawn. And college basketball doesn’t get any more symbolic than Virginia’s best player being known for yawning.
Virginia has been called boring so many times now that it’s boring. This is a team that plays the slowest pace in the country and by far the slowest in the NCAA tournament. Virginia is willing to wait as long as it’s allowed to find an open shot on offense, and its defense is designed to do the exact opposite for the other team. The result is that Virginia is the only school in Division I ranked in the bottom 20 in average length of possession on both sides of the ball, according to kenpom.com.
Anyone who doesn’t appreciate ultra-efficiency might yawn at Virginia’s strategy instead. Watching Brogdon can bring out the same reaction for a different reason: Yawning is contagious.
Almost anything related to yawning causes yawning, says Robert Provine, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County neuroscientist and esteemed yawnologist. His research shows that 55% of people yawn when they see someone else yawn—which may be why you want to yawn while reading about Brogdon yawning.
The way yawning spreads would suggest that Brogdon is the patient zero in a yawning epidemic on Virginia’s basketball team, but his teammates say they’re immune. “It never catches on,” Shayok said.
Why do we yawn? We yawn when we’re tired and bored, but also when we’re not. Scientific experiments have come up with explanations for yawning in rats (stress), rhesus macaques (testosterone) and Siamese fighting fish (aggression) that can be applied to humans. Researchers also know that yawning makes us happy. One of Provine’s early studies consisted of subjects from a psychology class who were asked to rate the pleasure of their yawns on a hedonic scale of 1-to-10. Their answer: 8.5.
Recent yawning research, however, is more relevant to Brogdon. It turns out yawning could be a performance advantage, too.
It’s not because it helps with oxygen intake. Psychological studies have proven there is no such effect. But yawning helps in another way. Anxiety increases brain temperature, and increased brain temperature has been associated with poor cognitive performance, said Andrew Gallup, a biopsychologist at State University of New York, Oneonta.
That’s where yawning comes in: A single yawn is all it takes to bring down the brain’s temperature and perhaps improve decision-making. There’s reason to believe Brogdon would be worse if he were hesitant about yawning.
Virginia’s players follow Brogdon’s lead in almost every way except when it comes to yawning—or at least that’s what they say. Everyone in the arena notices Brogdon’s yawns because he’s an All-American. But what if he weren’t? “I bet another person on the bench at Virginia could yawn at the same frequency and it would never be noticed,” Gallup said.
Brogdon’s own high-school coach, in fact, doesn’t remember him yawning back then. “That’s not to say he didn’t do it,” said Eddie Martin.
“Maybe he wasn’t paying attention,” Brogdon said.
0 Response to "Follow The NCAA Tournament"
Thanks for give comment.