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Robert Griffin III and the Sunk Cost Fallacy
By Neil Irwin
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/u...he-sunk-cost-fallacy.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1
The Washington Redskins have a controversy over who ought to be their quarterback, and it illustrates one of the most pernicious mistakes in economic decision-making that all of us make. It’s about the sunk cost fallacy.
We have a tendency to let our decisions be colored by things over which we have no control. But economic theory says we should make decisions based only on the costs and benefits that a course of action has in the future, not on “sunk costs,” which we’ll never get back. When you finish a plate of food you don’t really want just because you already paid for it, you’re falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy. On a bigger scale, the sunk cost fallacy can lead a company to keep pouring money into a failed venture, or a nation to keep pouring resources into a hopeless war.
Which brings us back to the Redskins.
For those who have not followed the tumultuous last few years in quarterbacking in Washington, the short version is this: In 2012, the team paid the highest price ever to draft an N.F.L. player, trading three years’ worth of first-round draft picks and a second-rounder to be able to move up in the draft and select Robert Griffin III, the explosive Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback. He had an excellent rookie season, leading the franchise to its first playoff appearance in years. Griffin looked to be on the path to greatness.
But in that playoff game he reinjured his knee badly, and last year he was at best a mediocre quarterback; he was benched for the final games. On Sunday he dislocated an ankle in the first quarter, an injury that will keep him off the field for weeks. Griffin’s backup, Kirk Cousins, led the offense to 41 points in the team’s first win after nine losses going back to last year.
The radio talk shows in Washington and beyond are now overtaken with arguments about whether Cousins really should be the starting quarterback, and whether Griffin will ever return to the elite form he showed in 2012. The Washington Post columnist Mike Wise is reporting that the team’s coach, Jay Gruden, has had doubts about Griffin’s passing ability and may view Cousins as better suited to run Gruden’s offense, but had to go with Griffin because the organization was so committed to him.
That’s where the sunk cost fallacy comes in.
The moment the owner Daniel Snyder signed off on trading those draft picks to the St. Louis Rams to get Griffin, those picks were gone forever. Poof! Never coming back. From that point, the strictly logical approach would have been for coaches and management to treat Griffin like any other rookie who had great potential but a lot of work to do to live up to it.
That doesn’t mean that they should have plopped him on the bench every time he made an errant throw. Of course he needed (and, apparently, still needs) to learn the pro-level game, and it’s worth sacrificing wins today if you are getting a more skilled player for the longer run. No one argues that the 1998 Indianapolis Colts should have parked Peyton Manning on the bench amid his 3-13 rookie season.
But there are plenty of indications that rather than treat Griffin like another promising but unfinished player, both fans and, at times, the team’s coaches seem to view him through the prism of what was paid to get him.
That may help explain why he started in Week 1 of the 2013 season, when it wasn’t clear that he had recovered from his playoff injury. If Wise’s reporting is right, it shows why the coaches never wavered from plans to start Griffin this year even as Cousins performed better in preseason games.
Among the team’s fans and management alike, there also seems to be something of a savior complex — that having paid so much to get him, Griffin must be either the greatest player ever to heave a football or all is lost.
This is ultimately unfair to Griffin, and unfair to anyone who roots for the team to do well.
For Griffin, it holds his performance to an impossible standard. If he doesn’t return this season, his record over his first three years as a pro football player will be something like: one excellent year, one mediocre year and one year lost to injury. That doesn’t make him a bust by any reasonable standard; he has already shown himself to be a much better quarterback than true busts like Ryan Leaf, drafted by the San Diego Chargers, and JaMarcus Russell, drafted by the Oakland Raiders.
He looks like a bust only compared with what the team paid to get him, trading away the chance for four top players to get one quarterback. By one analysis at the time, to justify that trade, Griffin would have needed to perform at the level of Tom Brady, who has three Super Bowl rings with the New England Patriots.
But it’s not Griffin’s fault that Snyder vastly overpaid to get him. Whether the 2012 trade was a wise one is a totally separate question from how good Griffin is or isn’t as a quarterback. It is possible for the trade itself to be an unmitigated disaster yet for Griffin to have a career that takes him to several Pro Bowls.
As Bill Barnwell wrote at Grantland on Monday, if this injury ends his season, Griffin’s career path will be veering away from that of reliable franchise quarterbacks like Andrew Luck (taken No. 1 over all by the Colts in the same draft where Griffin went No. 2) and “more toward that of somebody like Randall Cunningham or Trent Green as the above-average talent who has a few impressive post-hype seasons in between injuries.”
The thing is, Randall Cunningham and Trent Green both had quite good N.F.L. careers! And Robert Griffin III can, too, but only if fans, coaches and Griffin himself can rid themselves of the sunk cost fallacy and take his successes, and failures, on their own terms.
