Over the weekend, Peter Haberl, the senior sports psychologist for the Olympic committee told reporters that the games are "a unique environment to test mental and physical skills, it takes a great deal of ability and skill to stay focused on the task at hand."

I mention this because I've been this because I've been thinking a lot about motivation lately, especially when it comes to both the Olympics and the New England Patriots. The Olympics are a tricky situation because they're a one time deal for most athletes. Because of the importance of youth and because these games take place only once every four years. Excluding anomalies like 41 year old swimmer Dara Torres, most Olympians get one shot at the games. Talk about pressure.

Now let's talk about a different kind of pressure. Last year the Patriots did what no team has ever done in the history of football: they won 18 games in a row. These 18 games led them to the Superbowl which, if it were not for what many consider on of the strangest plays in the history of professional sport, they would have won as well.

But somehow Eli Manning managed to escape the grasp on nearly half of the New York Giants and David Tyree-primarily a special teams threat (albeit a good one who had been to the Pro Bowl for his special teams play)-found a way to trap an oblong object (the football) against a curved surface (his helmet) while falling towards the ground with grown men draped all over him.

The result was arguably the most painful loss in the history of football. Out the window went the Pat's miracle of the perfect season, out the window went the fancy Superbowl jewelry (Bill Parcels once noted that ‘football is only about the jewelry') and, because of the rules of free agency and the basic (I'm making up a word here) team-sported-ness of football, that team would never be together again and how could any other group of guys deign to play so together as to overcome the most Herculean of hurdles and get back to where they were: the edge of winning it all.

Which brings us back to the question of motivation. Everyone who watches football with any regularity knows that the hardest thing to do in football is to repeat a trip to the Superbowl. This past decade, the Seattle Seahawks were the only team to make the playoffs the year following their Superbowl run, and that includes the Patriots who won the big game three times in five years in that decade.

Now, pundits have been saying everything from they don't have a chance in hell (Randy Hill of Fox sports) to they're a sure bet (Peter Schrager of Fox Sports), but the truth of the matter is that nobody knows.

Peter Haberl mentions that the secret here is to focus not on the outcome goal (winning a gold medal or a Superbowl) but to focus on the process goals (technique and mechanics). The idea here is that one's technique and mechanics are within an athletes control as long as they stay focused in the present moment and that the outcome goal can only serve to distract one from the present moment.

But that may be fine for the Olympics, but what about the Patriots? The reason this is of so much interest is because the Patriot's coach, Bill Bilicheck is considered a master. His technique, as well documented in David Halberstam's excellent The Education of a Coach, is not straightforward psychology, rather it is what many sports analysts have termed: anti-psychology

Unlike, say, the aforementioned Bill Parcels, whose coaching style has often been described as pure emotion: meaning he knows what buttons to push in each and every player on his team to elicit an emotional reaction, mostly to make them feel small and shitty and, a real killer in the world of pro football, to question their manhood.

Bilicheck, instead, has gone the intellectual route. His pure gift is to be able to look at film of an opposing team and find their strengths and weaknesses better than any coach who has ever played this game. He then passes this information onto his players and they respond, at least according to Halberstam's analysis, because they know he knows how to make them better.

But how do you make your team better than a season that was one play away from being perfect is the basic psychological question here. How do you keep people focused on process rather than outcome when the most recent outcome was so devastating? And what is harder-winning an Olympic gold medal in a one-shot deal or the Patriots getting back to the Superbowl for a shot at redemption?

Over the next few posts I'll be trying to answer these questions but, as they are hard questions, I'm very open to ideas, so write me back and bring it on.....