Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - The Moment You Have to Decide | Brandon Marshall

Episode Date: February 8, 2026

Data on an NFL sideline is immediate. Decisions are filtered through fear, experience, and instinct.In this episode of The Game Inside the Games, Dr. Michael Gervais and NFL legend Brandon Marshall explore the tension between analytics and intuition—what happens when information is instant, comprehensive, and impossible to ignore. As technology reshapes decision-making on the NFL sideline, the real question becomes: when the moment arrives, what do you actually trust?Gervais draws on his conversation with Hillary Kerner, CMO of Insight, to examine the human side of AI adoption and why more data doesn’t automatically lead to better choices. Using fourth-down decision-making as a case study, the episode reveals how fear of blame, social pressure, and the need to justify decisions often outweigh what the numbers clearly show.This is a grounded look at how people make decisions under scrutiny—and why learning when to trust the data and when to trust yourself may be one of the most important skills in high-pressure environments.Follow Finding Mastery all week as The Game Inside the Games continues to unpack the inner game at global sporting events,, available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.🔥 Don’t miss this deep dive into the mind of an NFL mastermind.🎧 Subscribe and follow along with Finding Mastery all week as we unlock championship‑level thinking from the biggest moments in sports. Watch The Game Inside The Games on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.___________________This episode is brought to you by Insight and Microsoft. Insight is redefining integration for the Agentic Era by closing the 65% execution gap currently leaving enterprise AI at a standstill. As a leading Solutions Integrator and top 1% Microsoft partner, we don’t just provision licenses; we build the high-performance infrastructure and secure data estates AI requires to thrive. By converging AI-optimized networking with our proprietary Radius™ Microsoft 365 Copilot framework, we solve the infrastructure-AI paradox. From silicon to skills, Insight leverages "Customer Zero" expertise to transform software into a high-yield autonomous enterprise—enabling seamless, secure collaboration between your people and your AI.https://aka.ms/InsightMicrosoftCopilot See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Super Bowl becomes everything. There is so much noise. You have three hours to tell everybody what you know about this game. The game is everywhere. Okay, Brandon, were you more of a field player or a data player? I was a more, I'm a field guy. Like, I go through life just feeling. And now I am embracing more data.

when you played, how did you use data, information that was objectively observable, that there was something that you could study to better inform yourself? Yeah, so phases throughout the career, NFL career, the biggest is film, collecting data there. And that's a process, that's a journey. When I had my breakthrough moment when I, you know,

if I'm talking about film and the data around film, was probably year nine, year 10, and I'm watching the Patriots, and they were watching me, and they saw if I had my right foot up, and I was plus one yard from the numbers, I would run a certain route. And so that dictate how they played me.

And so I just saw how they were communicating the corner and the safety one game because I couldn't get off the line. It was just a average Joe type at corner, and he was strapping me up, meaning I couldn't catch the ball. He knew what you were doing because he studied you. So I was like, what is going on here?

So I saw how they were communicating. He had everything down. And so at halftime, I do the opposite. And then after the game, I start watching film a little bit more. And I said, ah, here's my tails. They got my tails before I got my tails. And then the second game, because it was against the Patriots, we played them twice a year when I was with the Jets.

The second game, I had it all down. and it was just an amazing game for myself and the offense. So that was real time. You are taking in a lot of information. You're struggling in the game. And then you figured out in that moment, like, they got me wired. Yes. They have studied me and they know my tells.

What about the film that would come to the sidelines? And let's rewind like, I don't know, 10 years ago, you see the coaches, they'd be flipping through paper. There was a printer on the side. Do you remember this? Yes. There's a printer on the sideline. Well, no, I don't remember.

I'm not that old. That was before my time. I don't know. Oh, no, no. I never, yes, I was in the game when they had the papers and we look at the papers. I never saw the printers on the sideline. There was a printer right in the back. That's how they got there.

That's how they got there. So I remember the first time on the sidelines, I looked and there's a printer. And I'm like, what is that for? And then I see this kind of janky black and white paper. So somebody was taking pictures from above, sending it to our printer. And then a coach. the coaches will grab it and like you would look at. So on that, that's data too.

That's right. 100%. Would you use that data to help inform you? And if so, how was that data useful? Both are important. That's why I said that, you know, I was a field guy. I would go out there. I could just feel where everyone is at.

And that's a different type of mastery physically and athletically, right? Where you can just feel the game. Your basketball, football IQ is through the roof, right? But if you really want to master the sport, then you have to collect all that. So for me, I would go out there and say I have a slant route and it's I'm on the right side. It's a five yards and you slant in. Okay. If I felt the guy leaning, I would go back to the quarterback and I would say, hey, we got our sluggle, which is five yards slant.

They come back out. Touchdown. Yeah. Explain a sluggo. A slugle is a slant and go. That's right. Okay. And so I would feel that.

And I would call that. And Coach Shanahan, Jay Cuppler, will listen to me. And it would be right. But now what happened, once we got those tablets on the field, on the sideline, now it would confirm. So it's like, oh, yeah, we see what you see, B. Quarterback coach is now communicating to the quarterback. Quarterback communicated office coordinator. No, listen to B, he's right.

Look at the pitcher. Look at slide five. Slide five, he's inside. I can't throw that something. It might be a pick six. Let's go sluggo. B's right. Yeah.

So data is confirming intuition. in this case. Yeah, and I think mastery, though, the way we're talking about it, you have to have both. That's right. You have to have both. You can't just rely on field,

and there's some coaches that get it wrong where they're all science. It's all data. No, you have to have a feel. And you have to know that, like, great players have great feel. And so when they come and it challenges your data, are you going to listen to them?

Hey, coach, man, I'm telling you, let's go cover zero right now. I'm telling you, it's a tale. The center is hands twitching. Every time they do this, his hands twitching. Listen to me, coach. That's not going to get picked up on data. That's not going to get picked on film.

That is a different type of information. So you're saying the instincts, the intuition, the awareness, the feel of the whole thing, and then also the information that was coming from an outside source. 100% data is everything. How do you use data right now in your business? I mean, key KPIs and metrics, right? Right. You know, let's say on the media side, viewership.

watch time, conversions, downloads, all that stuff matters. You're looking at it all the time. And the people that are sponsoring the show or buying the show are looking. And congratulations on your new show. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you so much. Can you take a minute and talk about how you're using data on that show?

No, we'll come back to that because I like where you just asked me because this is big because there's a lot of business folks that watch finding mastery, right? And so you have to lean into the numbers. but then also you can walk in and you can like, I think the industry's going here. I don't think it's, I think it's YouTube. YouTube right now and they're changing a little bit. Maybe we go to Snap.

And this is like getting ahead of it. This is breakthrough. This is innovation. This is disruption. Like if you're a conservative, don't go off of your field. Just go off the numbers. But if you're really trying to break through,

you're really trying to capture more territory, more ground. You have to be able to have to have. that gut. You have to be able to say, um, so let's go to there's two paths and we're talking about the interaction of the two. When we go, if we want to build that intuition, that feeling piece, what is the cap, what are the skills to be better at that? And I'm going to ask the same question. You want to scrub and discern and like really understand data. What are those skills? Right. So on the field side, which is where I'm, where I thrive. Yeah. But I need to go more data in this phase of my career. On the field side, it's, uh, it's, uh, what you say,

earlier. You can't, you have to build a culture that's not afraid to fail. And you got to fail fast, and you got to fail forward. That's easy to say. It's really hard to do. It's really hard. It's really hard. Let's go there. Talk about how do you work with failure? What can our community understand from one of the greats on how to deal with mistakes that are public? Oh, failure is the, is the greatest teacher. That's your model. Oh, I love, I love failure. No, no, no. No. I love failure. You gotta love failure because you're going to fail. Like this quote, we all want to say, oh, Michael Jordan said, you see the numbers. He missed more shots than he took, right?

Like, but he's the greatest. Okay. Baseball players, 300 is great. Like, 700 missing, 300 hitting. Yeah. Right. So, but I, you and I were together at the Seattle Seahawks when I watched you, I watched you drop a ball that you needed to catch.

Mm-hmm. And I watched you come from the far side of the field. come all the way back to the sidelines. And you had your head up. You were like, you were showing all the right stuff. Do you remember this in any respect? Well, my, yes, but my routine was always the same after a mistake. After a mistake.

I would love for you to explain that. But I also watched, like, you didn't love that mistake. No. You didn't love that failure. I don't know if you wanted to crawl into a hole or like, but you fought through it. Yeah. And so there's a feeling behind there's really motion. And so when I say love failure, it's like, no, you have to work through it.

You can't get trapped in that. You got to move through it the right way. Meaning if I drop that ball and then that feeling that you feel, you put your head down, you soak, you keep worrying about it. You're going to drop the next one. So you have to start working through it. And the way it looked for me is when I was with the Dolphins, that was 2018, 2011. I had one of my toughest years publicly. right like they were just signed me to the biggest deal at the wide receiver position in the history of the NFL and uh they never had a thousand they have had a thousand yard receiver in like 10 years i did all of that but i dropped like 10 balls and i only had three or four touchdowns and the media was just on me on me on me on me and so what i did i learned a lot in this season actually so what i would do after every single practice i would go home and i would just catch a thousand more balls this is after being out in a hundred degree weather two hour practice etc every everywhere i dropped the

ball, like in every situation, I would mimic that at home. I had my coach, like another coach come, and I would mimic that. What happened was nothing changed that season. The next year, I caught 118 balls the most balls I ever caught. Look how I embraced failure. There you go. Yeah. And that was a big, there was two big lessons there for me, though. One good, one bad. I was like, damn, the reward came later. Didn't come in that moment. I I wanted to catch the ball and have like the perfect hands that year. Yeah. It didn't happen.

But because I was working, I was grinding in that moment, it came the next season. 118 balls, Mike. Are you listening to me? I couldn't drop a ball. I was catching balls like this. You were like a vacuum. I played against Richard Sherman and you guys. Y'all came there.

I had 165 catches. Yards, excuse me. You were hard to do it. I couldn't drop a ball. You hear me. That's why. That's why you got signed. Now here's the other part of like the bad part to that.

What drove me to do that was that negative talk. I let it come in like what Cam Newton was saying. I let it come in. It was like festive. Now are you saying that's a good thing? That was a bad thing. But it drove you to more work. See, at the time I didn't understand all of this.

As far as like that failure was going to be a part of it, I didn't understand that you're going to have to fight for your confidence at times, even if you are Michael Jordan, even if you are Cam Newton, if you are Tiger Woods. Brandon Marshall. Okay, I didn't understand that. Yeah. So me sitting here, listen to that, that negative talk,

it drove me to a place where I was overworking and how I felt while I was doing it. I mean, I was crying sometimes doing that. Yeah, this is. But if I understood that, hey, B, sometimes you're going to have a year like this, or a season or a game like that. So just keep your process. What is your process? What's your routine?

And then also be proactive. I didn't have a sports psych colleges at the time. Yeah. How about it? It's changing. Why do I have to wait until I'm in one of those moments to then go get help or talk to somebody? Why wouldn't you already have that in place? So when those moments hit, because they will hit.

You get through it a little faster or you're a little to be more efficient with it. Or you're not as lonely. you're speaking to what my hope is for people is that they'll hear you, one of the most dominant receivers in the league at one time, saying, look, invest in your mental process, invest in your psychology, invest in your inner life, because you don't have to go through the same torture process that I went through. Yeah.

It could be a great joy for you. Man, 70,000 people. saw me drop this ball, four or five million people watching on Fox. They're crushing me right now. I'm going to go work quietly, no lights, no cameras. And when I get that opportunity again, whenever it come this year, next year,

they're going to be talking so beautiful about me. There's going to be deals, gatorade. This is self-talk, too. Yeah. Go back to that. Yeah, this is self-talk. I can see it. I can feel it.

that's how I was as an athlete. So now as a business person, like you're converting all of those skills that you had into understanding data for you to be great. Right now we're in a world where there's so much information, there's so much data, there's so much for us to wrestle and discern with. How are you making that switch to work so well with your body and the social environment to work with data?

And I'm sure you're not trained in it. I'm sure you're learning as it's going. Like how are you managing that? Yeah. I have the fundamentals and I have the fundamentals down and it's all about routine. So every day we're looking at the key metrics and we're tracking it. It's great insight. And so I have a routine where I'm engaging with it.

But here's the biggest part. My gift and my greatest contribution to my company is my feel, is my intuition. So who on my team has the gift of data, data, data, data, right? Who on my team has that? So I don't need to be what I'm not. I need to embrace that. So now that gets us into another conversation of like how we work together and there is no weakness. Like let me do what I do great.

Let me put some people around me. That's great at that. So who on my team loves it? That's exactly where if we point to winning cultures, and let's point to the Seattle Seahawks right now as a culture of high performance, or maybe even said a culture that supports high performance, is that it rests on being great teammates to each other.

You've got to take care of yourself so you can be a great teammate. That's right. So that you can support and challenge them to be their very best. And then they're taking care of their stuff to support and challenge somebody else. So this teeming bit, do you remember experiences, in playoff games in the season where you were not a good teammate. Do you remember situations where other people were great teammates to you? Can you bring some of that to life to help understand that part of the process?

There's so much there. The first thing that came to mind was I dropped the ball or offense when I was in Chicago. Offensively, we weren't rolling, but defense was. And this is a very surface level one, right? just the first thing that came to mind. And I was walking back to the sideline. This is when I first got to Chicago. And our defensive guys, our leaders,

or pretty much the whole defense would come out. It was Brian Ur-Lacker, Charles Peanut Tillman, Julius Peppers, Lance Briggs, Izzy, like, everyone's coming out there. And they're like, get the next one, high-five, and high-five. I've never seen a culture like that. And so for me, offensively, or if it was myself that contribute to, the bad series or the bad drives, my head was down. I'm not helping a team win right now.

And I was down on myself. And they were like, no, no, next one, next one, next one, right? And so that was my first experience around like a winning culture and how they had each each other's back. But there are so many times where, you know, I was, the first four years in my career, I was a high performer, but I also was a challenge for the team and coaches because I was, I wouldn't even call it selfish.

I would call it, it was just that, that's where I was in my journey. It was more focused on yourself? No, I think that, yeah, but it's not coming from a selfish place. It's coming from trauma. It's coming from upbringing. I come from a place where I got to take, care of myself. I come from a place where I can't trust this guy or that person. So we didn't

build. I wasn't in a, I went, I wasn't in a thriving culture where we were cultivating and building those relationships. So it mattered when we were in those tough moments. So in those tough moments, what I would do is I would worry about me. I would focus on me, which means you're a bad team. You can't, if you're a selfish guy or if you're focused on yourself in that way. That's right. You're a bad teammate. Yeah, because you can't be there for somebody else. Yeah, no, no. Yeah. Yeah, I want you to do your job. Do you. your job, Bill Belichick point there. Do your job. Because if you do your job, we're all good, but it can't be to the detriment of the team.

Brandon, there is so much information that's coming in. And what I love about this conversation, there's so much data. The technology world is exploding around us and underneath of our, our feet even. And there's so much happening that you're pointing to another source of data, which is the information that is available to you so that you can read a room. that you can, the information to be connected to another person. There's so much information that's coming in. It's imperative that, yes, the computer superpowers need to crunch that data, but we need to work with our information. That's right. So that we can be there for other people. I love this conversation. There's zero confusion about why you were so good in the league

and why other people and how other people can use your process, how to let go of mistakes, how to be a great teammate, how to speak to yourself well, so that they can work well in this wild world right now that we're in, where there's a lot of anxiety, a lot of confusion, a lot of uncertainty. But using the data from within is certainly going to be one of those path forward. But using the data from within will certainly be one of those pass forward. 100%. It's good.

I had a great conversation with Insight CMO Hillary Kerner about the human side of AI adoption. Insight is right on the front edge of this massive change that all of us are trying to sort out, which is how do we work with AI? Can you just take a moment and ground us and me on Insight and what you guys do and how you go about doing it? It's a really interesting moment to be in tech. You know, we've been through shifts like this before with cloud, mobile, social media. I have never seen one like this. It is happening to us so quickly.

And it also feels very human because it interacts in natural language. So like the emotional stakes are a lot higher. But it's a really interesting moment for our company. We make some of this really innovative tech accessible to smaller mid-sized companies. We partner with amazing technology companies like Microsoft to make their AI more accessible to our customers. What is harder, giving people to spend net new money or to share? shift their thinking and behavior to adopt. Oh, such an interesting question.

The hardest part is actually once they've bought the technology, helping them use it. A lot of companies make these big AI investments, and they sit on the shelf because they haven't thought through the change management strategy that's really going to be necessary to take advantage of them. Or they haven't thought through the use cases. How do you help people navigate that piece with AI?

So one of the things that Insight does that we have found it helps our customers a lot is like really helping them see how AI goes into the workflow. If you're just like building an agent for yourself or you're doing this very surface level project, you're not, it's not going to have an impact. It's a lot of the reason that a lot of these companies kind of give up and abandon the agent and, you know, move on. You have to identify the workflow where you want the AI to actually work. There is a difference between taking an existing business process and plopping AI in it and actually rethinking what would this process this look like, now that I have AI, maybe I would do it differently. And that is where we have

seen our customers have the biggest success. For example, some of our best champions are sitting in finance. They're the ones who are going to tell you what the real and actual impactful use cases are going to be. So companies need to find who those people are and then like organize them. Those are your allies. Yes. So they're early adopters. They like solving the problems that are going to naturally arise on the frontier. And those are the ones that you want to make sure understand what the technology can do. Exactly. Okay, co-pilot, what does the analytical research show

about NFL fourth-down decision-making? Are NFL coaches generally making the right fourth-down calls? Or is there evidence that would suggest that there's a consistent bias? For most of the modern analytics era, NFL coaches have been systematically too conservative on fourth-down. They tended to punt or kick in situations.

We're going for it. actually boost their odds of winning. Now, that bias has gotten smaller recently as more teams lean into analytics and go forward in the other situations. But it's still not completely gone. So that makes sense. The brain's primary job is to keep us safe, not just physically, but also socially. And that social preservation is always at play.

What's happening is our brain is constantly scanning for threats, blame, judgment, critique, you know, the fallout of getting decision wrong. That's one of the great consequences when you're really going for it and certainly when you're going for it in public settings. So in these high-pressured moments, the wiring, the decision-making happens really fast. And that's why we want to make sure ahead of time that we're really clear on what the mission is. So when a coach faces a fourth down call, the brain is not responding in ways like, okay, am I going to be okay if it goes wrong? Rather, what are the choices I need to make right now to put our team in the best situation? And so there's a calling of information to get to that choice, and there's a gating out of all of the noise.

And some of that noise is the doubt and worry about if it goes wrong. I clearly understand why historically the bias has been what it is, which is to play it's safe. But what we're seeing now is analytics has changed that narrative to address that bias to say, look, the best probability is to put yourself in a situation where you have the highest chance to score the most points. I love that data is informing a radical shift in the league. And also what makes the greats great is that they also incorporate their intuition, the feel of what's happening. So it's both data and intuition, as probably it should be.

Thank you for joining us. I am Dr. Michael Jervais. And I have really enjoyed the learnings from the series. And my hope is that you will take these best practices and deploy them in your own life. For you to be your very best as a person, for you to be your very best as a teammate, with the people that matter most to you. I'm wishing you all the success in your life, and go Hawks.

Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by Dr. Tim Specter, one of the world's leading experts on nutrition and the gut microbiome. In this conversation, Tim and Mike challenged some of the biggest stories we've been sold about food, why calories and protein may be distracting us from what our bodies actually need and how a widespread lack of fiber is quietly driving inflammation,

metabolic issues, and poor long-term health. It's a powerful reframe. on how to eat, heal, and care for the ecosystem inside you. Join us Wednesday, February 11th at 9 a.m. Pacific, only on Finding Mastery. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community.

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