On NFL draft day, every team has the chance to win — or lose — big. With millions of dollars on the line and just minutes to make a final decision on each pick, a single choice can shape a franchise for years. Carnegie Mellon University experts said those intense moments offer a window into how people make decisions when the stakes are highest.
The science of choking under pressure
The draft might seem like a pure test of judgment: Pick the best player available. For Steven M. Chase(opens in new window), a professor of biomedical engineering and the Neuroscience Institute(opens in new window) at CMU, those moments reveal something interesting about the human brain.
“Most of what I study has to do with these moments in time when you’re about to perform an action, and you know what the outcome might be if you’re successful. So the draft is fun to watch because the stakes are so high for these teams,” he said.
Chase studies what happens when people choke under pressure(opens in new window) and how the brain prepares for action. In controlled experiments, his team has found that as rewards increase, performance improves — up to a point. Things like peer influence, time constraints and even the promise of a big reward can affect performance.
At the draft, the coaches, general managers and analysts have just a few minutes — 10, in the first round — to make their pick. Their teams have spent months evaluating players, running scenarios and building models to guide them. When things go as planned, they may not feel much sway from the ticking clock.
But when something unexpected happens — a top prospect falls, a rival team makes a surprise move — decision-makers are forced into the very conditions where pressure can interfere most.
What looks like hesitation or second-guessing in those moments may not just be strategic decision-making. It may also be a biological response to the intensity of the moment. When the potential reward is highest, Chase said, performance doesn’t always rise to meet it. That’s thanks to something he calls “the jackpot effect.”
“People are more likely to be able to throw a paper ball into a wastebasket for $2 than to win $100,” Chase explained. “It’s easy to follow through on a plan when the stakes are low. But when everything is on the line — a game-winning shot or a critical call — performance often tanks.”
Why long-term thinking is so difficult
By nature, the draft is about planning for the future. Teams won’t know the results of their picks for months or years to come. That kind of planning is not something people are generally good at, said Cleotilde (Coty) Gonzalez(opens in new window), a professor in CMU’s Department of Social and Decision Sciences(opens in new window).
Gonzalez, who studies how people make decisions in complex environments, said one of the biggest challenges is that many important decisions unfold over time — and the consequences aren’t immediately visible, like when managing a personal budget or maintaining a healthy weight. In those situations, inputs and outcomes accumulate gradually and are not always easy to balance.
“The main mistake is to underestimate the delay between cause and effect,” Gonzalez said. “If we don’t observe an effect right away, we assume nothing is happening.”
That gap between action and outcome makes it difficult to connect cause and effect. By the time the results of a decision become clear, they are often shaped by many other choices made along the way. In the NFL draft, a player’s true impact may not be fully understood for years — long after the moment of selection has passed.
Experience, Gonzalez said, helps bridge that uncertainty.
“Under time pressure, seasoned experts are better able to identify which details matter most and retrieve relevant information quickly. If you’re new to the decision-making team, you’re more likely to focus on the wrong signals or rely on instincts that don’t fit the situation,” she said.
What data can — and cannot — measure
NFL teams aren’t making decisions blindly. Decisions in the draft aren’t made by individuals alone. They’re made by teams, supported by data.
Tim Derdenger(opens in new window), an associate professor of marketing and strategy at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business(opens in new window), said that sports organizations operate in one of the most data-rich decision environments anywhere.
“In sports, you have decades of consistent data and clear outcomes,” Derdenger said. “That gives teams a real advantage in decision-making.”
Every college play, player metric and game situation can be analyzed. Teams use that information to build models that estimate how likely a prospect is to succeed — not just in general, but alongside particular teammates and coaches.
Data is only part of the picture.
Inside draft rooms, the people making the decisions — scouts, analysts and coaches — matter just as much as the team they’re trying to build. Like businesses making high-stakes hires, decision makers also weigh harder-to-measure qualities: how a player performs under pressure, whether they build trust and how they shape a team’s culture. Those factors don’t show up cleanly in a dataset.
Derdenger argues that culture is the secret sauce. “The real goal is building a room where authenticity isn’t just welcomed — it’s expected,” he said.
In draft rooms, scouts, analysts and coaches all bring different perspectives. But if people hesitate to speak up — because of things like hierarchy or fear of being wrong — the decision-making process breaks down.
“If people censor themselves, you’re no longer making decisions with full information. Once your scouts start playing it safe with their reports, you’ve already lost. You’re essentially heading into the draft with a blind spot, Derdenger said.
Over time, that dynamic can lead to groupthink, where consensus overrides critical evaluation.
“The danger isn’t just one bad decision,” he said. “It’s the accumulation of poor decisions over time.”
“Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The institution was originally established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical School. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology and began granting four-year degrees.”
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