The Psychology of Irrational Exuberance

Irrational exuberance isn’t just for financial bubbles anymore; it can be translated to any situation in which you ignore mounting evidence that a good thing is about to go bad.


Got a new girlfriend that’s way out of your league? Wondering why she wouldn’t let you borrow her chap stick, always has loads of small bills that smell like aloe and has a wide assortment of body lotions that all contain glitter? To the impartial observer that’s a clear case of a stripper with raging herpes. But to the guy who’s about to get that first “random” cold sore, he looks past all of the clear evidence for the typo riddled text message from Porsche at 4am asking what he’s up to.

And when we look back with the benefit of hindsight we ask ourselves how we could have been so stupid to ignore such obvious signs. It’s quite simple. We see what we want to see until reality wakes us up with a shift kick to the jimmy.

This Saturday, irrational exuberance reared its ugly head Kinnick Stadium. For 9 weeks Iowa has been winning game after game that it had no business winning. Normally a glass half empty guy, I went on the record as giving Iowa a 20% shot to get smoked in the National Title game, treating the Big Ten title like it was Kirk Ferentz’s birthright.

We ignored the warning signs; an inability to consistently move the ball… injuries piling up on a team that no one is mistaking for having USC-like depth… a penchant for turnovers… the lack of a gamebreaker at the skill positions. (And for all of those fans who want to drop Marvin McNutt’s name here let’s put it this way. Sure he’s a great college player who may even be able to bulk up a bit and develop into an Ernest Wilford type player in the NFL. But if your argument is based on Marvin McNutt’s ability to out run Indiana’s entire secondary for 90 yards, you need to find a new measuring stick. Indiana is a Division I football program in name only.)

The chickens came home to roost in the form of a moderately talented Northwestern team that may or may not be able to win the Motor City Bowl. And this is key because if this happened versus OSU the bubble would not have burst. Then it would have been a simple case of an “elite” team losing to another “elite” team on their home field. There’s no shame in getting knocked out by George Foreman (the angry 1970s version… not the benevolent 1990s version), but when Gerry Cooney puts you on the canvas you start to reconsider your life view.

So now the flaws are apparent to even the most myopic fans. If we wondered why Ferentz was sticking with Stanzi despite his penchant for throwing picks, our questions were answered on Saturday. We told ourselves that Ken O’Keefe was playing possum with the play calling and saving a little something up his sleeve for OSU. But then we watched him call a naked bootleg in his own end zone and then air it out 27 times in just over two quarters with an unheralded redshirt freshman with 3 previous pass attempts and remembered that his play selection is more limited than the orignal TECMO Bowl.

This bubble did hurt. This team was our everyman. No one stood out; they just went about their business every Saturday, gave us a heart attack and won. But eventually, the next man in philosophy will fail. But in terms of the typical case of irrational exuberance this one is fairly mild. Fortunately for us, this bout of irrational exuberance didn’t cost us any money… unless you already put down a non-refundable deposit on airfare and hotel to Pasadena. And unlike most other forms of irrational exuberance, this one is a rare case in which the rollercoaster ride to the top was worth the inevitable crash. Coming into this year, Iowa had the catch. Now, we get to ask which one.

So the Hawks journey on to OSU and the land of jean shorts with an uneven redshirt freshman under center. Vegas will likely post Iowa to be 20 point dogs now that Terrell Pryor seems to have entered into the “game manager” category of quarterback evaluation and Iowa’s QB will still be in the “who is this guy’s backup” category. Maybe Iowa has one more miracle up their sleeves, but the realistic goal from here on out has to be to make it interesting in Columbus, hoist the pig in two weeks and head into a January 1 bowl game with a chance to make a statement for 2010.