The “Hail Mary” pass in football is one of the most exciting moments in sports. When there is no time left on the clock, and your team is down by more than a field goal, and the Quarterback throws that ball up high, and your receiver comes down with it in the middle of a pack, that moment may be the epitome of why we watch sports.

This video is a perfect crystallization of the moment and why it is so exciting. I actually saw this live as a young kid. I grew up a Cowboys fan and I was watching this on TV, and when Pearson snagged it, you would think from my (and probably every other Cowboy fan in existence) reaction that the “Boys had already won the Super Bowl, rather than just got the chance to go to it”.

The problem is, that in the excitement of the success, and the water cooler talk that follows for weeks after, we forget one little thing – that the Hail Mary is a desperation move that fails far, far more often than it succeeds. We are so giddy from the excitement that we lose sight of that fact. Not one football team plans to use the Hail Mary play as part of their preferred game plan. It is instead a “nothing else left to do” moment.

So why do I bring that up on a website devoted to self-defense oriented issues? Because too much of the techniques and tactics in self-defense are the equivalent of the Hail Mary pass. We are going to do that cool technique that “worked” one time because it seems cool and makes us feel like John Wick, when in fact the move will fail 98% of the time. Years ago I got into a debate with fairly known instructor about the efficacy of the Superman punch. He was advocating for it as a legitimate and useful move for self-defense, and insisted that because it “worked” in MMA, that was enough proof it was good for self-defnse. So I went back and looked at the prior two years of UFC fights and I found that indeed, the superman punch worked – about 20% of the time! The rest of the time, it failed, either to do any damage or to even make contact. I used that info in the debate because it makes exactly zero sense to try to train a technique that only works two out of ten times when it is performed by a professional athlete at the peak of fighting condition, when none of us fit that description because it will work even more poorly for us lesser mortals. Yes, when it lands, it is spectacular, and makes us feel awesome. I am far more concerned about all the times it does not land, because that is where most of us will be most of the time.

Unfortunately, this type of thinking is too prevalent in the training community. I think, besides that it may make us feel cool when it works, that the biggest reason people like to focus on these moves is that they tend to be easier to work and train. It is much easier to plan on using an eye gouge or a hair grab or a throat punch that we only need to work for a little bit in order to be ready to fight than the alternative which is much more difficult to face up to; that this work is hard and requires a much blood, sweat, tears, and time, and that the entire way our ego is undergoing constant attack because we will realize we are not actually John Wick.

And it is not just techniques or physical action that can constitute these wishful tricks. Hardware tends to be a big go-to move for too many people. “I carry a back up gun in my pocket to deal with anyone who tries to grapple me” is an all too typical refrain, as is people looking for another trigger, or sights, or ammo to make up for a poor skill set. If our shooting is lacking, it becomes much easier to buy new gear than it is to shoot more repetitions on Dot Torture or other similar foundational drills.

The solution is that we need to focus on the things that we regular everyday folks are able to do. What are the most robust, reliable, and replicable concepts and techniques that will work in most contexts and most situations that can be trained in a reasonable amount of time.

Those are the things we can count on, not the flashy tricks.