Jesse Minter thinks the Ravens are ‘too much of a momentum team.’ Not everyone agrees.

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Jay Goldstein is an academic who studies the psychology of sports. He is also a Ravens fan. Which means that his fall Sundays can, on a personal and professional level, be quite difficult.

It’s one thing to care so much about a team that your wife barely tolerates watching games in the same room as you. It’s another to watch a 13-0 Ravens lead turn into a 35-13 Cincinnati Bengals win and also feel the impulse to intellectualize yet another collapse.

“They can’t get out of their own way,” Goldstein said of the Ravens, whose loss on Sunday marked their 10th blown double-digit lead in the second half since the start of the 2022 season.

There is plenty wrong with the Ravens heading into Sunday’s showdown with the Buffalo Bills. Their star quarterback hasn’t played in nearly four weeks and might not be fully healthy upon his return. Their offensive line hasn’t found a working combination that can stick on the field. Their pass defense has been one of the NFL’s worst after halftime.

And that is just what coach Jesse Minter sees. What he feels is something perhaps even more worrisome: “Right now, we’re too much of a momentum team,” he said Sunday. “We’re riding the wave when it’s good, and we’re riding the wave when it’s bad.”

The Ravens have, for years now, all but begged for psychoanalysis. Fans channel Jung and Freud after every confounding loss. So do reporters. Sometimes even players have diagnoses; defensive lineman Calais Campbell said the Ravens’ control of Sunday’s game slipped away “like quicksand.” He pointed to an oft-cited source of trouble: The Ravens had lost momentum.

Not everyone is so sure. Asked Thursday about the idea of momentum in football, safety Kyle Hamilton said, “I don’t think it affects me.” His play-to-play approach was “practical,” he said, almost dispassionate.

“I feel like sometimes we’re thinking, like, the whole world’s going to end if something bad happens, and that’s not the approach that you need to have in this sport and life in general,” Hamilton said. “None of our tombstones are going to say, ‘Kyle Hamilton: Football Player.’ It’s a game that we play, and we need to have fun doing it. We need to be out there playing the game like we’re playing a game and not like we’re doing a chore.”

Momentum is easy to feel. But it can be hard to substantiate. Goldstein, a kinesiology lecturer at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health, pointed to a December 2019 analysis published in the Journal of Economic Psychology. Researchers looked at nearly 900 overtime games over 11 NBA seasons and found similar odds of winning for both teams, regardless of which had tied the score at the end of regulation, “suggesting that coming from behind … does not provide a meaningful psychological momentum.”

Stu Singer, the founder and chief psychologist of WellPerformance, has worked as a sports psychology and performance consultant for the Washington Wizards, Washington Mystics and Maryland women’s basketball team, among other clients. But he said he didn’t see the Ravens’ late-game struggles as “a momentum thing.”

High-level football players who enter the fourth quarter of a game trailing by double digits “don’t even think that’s a big deal,” Singer said. “They know that that’s so much time. I just don’t think that’s the issue.”

Athletes feel individual momentum more acutely. They have what some psychologists call an “individual zone of optimal functioning,” wherein they reach something akin to a flow state. In-game success can promote feelings of confidence and dominance, Goldstein said.

But mistakes — not even their own — can be disruptive to a player’s performance.

“What happens when everyone’s kind of in that zone for a couple moments, and somebody makes that mistake — now you’re kind of backing yourself up on the field,” Goldstein said. “I think it’s one of those things where there’s so much harmony and synchronization that has to go on between those 11 players. It only takes that one to kind of disrupt it.”

Some athletes are more durably built to withstand a game’s ebbs and flows. The cadence of football is unique, Goldstein said; it tests players’ ability to maintain a “hyperfocus” for only a few seconds each play, reset, then return to that state for however long a drive lasts, quarter after quarter.

The challenge for the Ravens, according to experts, is limiting self-doubt. Singer said it’s widely believed that humans have 5,000 to 25,000 thoughts every day. Most of them are mundane. Few are novel. But the brain, Singer said, “is wired for protection, not performance.” So it would only be natural, then, for a Ravens player stuck in the shadow of the team’s fourth-quarter flops to wonder: What if this is happening again?

“The brain will do that,” Singer said. “Most of the time, what’s directing it is, is there something lurking that can be dangerous to me? And so once something’s happened enough, it’s almost impossible to prevent that thought from popping into your head.”

But that can be vanquished, too. Singer said athletes can avoid catastrophizing by acknowledging their pessimism, however misguided it might seem, and moving on. On the football field, there is always something else more urgent to lock onto — a coverage assignment, a blocker, a third-and-long. Those responsibilities should make it easier to avoid what Goldstein called a “threat mode,” where feelings of déjà vu can be paralyzing.

Like any other skill, however, positive thinking must be practiced and honed. While the Ravens do not employ a dedicated sports psychologist or mental performance coach, Minter said the Ravens’ staff offers similar coverage with its background and training. Dr. Tricia Bent-Goodley, the team’s clinician, works with players on their mental health. Jameel McClain, a former Raven, is the director of player engagement. Johnny Shelton is the team’s chaplain.

Goldstein lamented that a stigma still exists around seeing a psychologist, especially in football: “It used to be, if you had to go see a shrink, you were damaged goods, and Coach didn’t want to deal with you.”

But some self-help techniques can be radically simple. In college, George Kittle, now a star tight end for San Francisco 49ers, would draw a literal button in red or black marker on his wrist tape. After every play, good or bad, he would hit the button. That was his mental reset.

“You have to practice that, essentially daily and for a long time, to get to the point where in a game scenario, you can choose presence and focus,” Singer said. “It sounds simplistic to say, but it’s hard to do.”

On the other side of the locker room Thursday, almost directly across from Hamilton, was a more ardent believer in momentum. Right tackle Roger Rosengarten called it “huge.” He also said it was a “hard thing to navigate,” for one obvious reason: Momentum isn’t always positive.

“Whenever you have a bad play or a good play, it’s about next-play mentality,” he said. “Flush it.”