This story is part of Peak. Athletics A table covering the sports mind. Sign up for the Peak newsletter over here.
It was supposed to be a casual lunch, just a chance to meet an NFL legend and influential rapper.
But Las Vegas Raiders rookie quarterback Fernando Mendoza couldn’t help himself when he sat down with Tom Brady and Travis Scott earlier this year. He He wrote everything On the notebook.
At just 22 years old, Mendoza has won many awards: a college football national champion, a Heisman Trophy winner and the No. 1 draft pick. But if the NFL rewards more note-taking, he’ll run for it.
Christopher Columbus High School in Miami, Mendoza He took note of the team’s training plan At lunch time. At Cal, his first college stop before transferring to Indiana, he was known for carrying old-school calculators everywhere. And when Mendoza took part in his first NFL offseason practice this summer, he meticulously wrote out each pass play in longhand, detailing the structure.
The habit is so ingrained that Mike Pawlowski — a former Cal quarterback and radio commentator — once He remembered Mendoza arrives at his home during dinner to find the notebook.
Mendoza, who is set to begin the season as the Raiders’ backup, isn’t the only quarterback or football player with experience taking notes by hand. Indeed, as the world becomes increasingly digital — based on laptops, tablets and note-taking apps — the NFL is a staple of old-school note-taking.
One veteran NFL player estimated that 75 to 80 percent of players still carry notes by hand.
Writing longhand has many advantages. The process of taking notes can help with memory and recall. Handwriting is slower than typing, forcing people to summarize and repeat the teacher’s or coach’s ideas in their own words. The combination helps to understand. But the biggest benefit to learning comes from what educational psychologists call the “external storage function,” a fancy word for a simple idea: note-taking creates a document to review.
In fact, years of research on college students have shown that taking notes by hand leads to better academic performance and higher grades than typed notes — but only when students take detailed assessments.
“Note-taking alone is not enough to promote deep, meaningful, long-term attention,” says Abraham E. Flanagan, assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Georgia.
It is one of the fascinating aspects of note taking. In a vacuum, it doesn’t matter whether students take notes by hand or by typing. If you do nothing else, each group will do the same thing. But if each group engages in a broader assessment process, then students who take notes by hand will perform better.
One theoretical reason, Flanigan says, is that taking notes by hand creates a more meaningful and deeply structured record of information than a classroom lecture or meeting. This serves as a better stimulus – or brain teaser – for students when they review them later.
Another reason is that because people can type faster than they can write, it allows students to record what is being said verbally on the computer without thinking about material. But writing notes by hand requires a more engaged mental filter.
“To do that, one has to think hard enough to understand the content,” says Daniel Oppenheimer, a professor of psychology and decision science at Carnegie Mellon. “Also, being forced to think about it and understand it helps people learn the material better.”
Buzz Williams is onto something with his hand-lettering habit.
Ellis Devlin
Terry McLaurin, a two-time Pro Bowl receiver for the Washington Chiefs, said he keeps a diary every day, jotting down details from practices and meetings and reviewing it every night before bed to prepare for the next day.
“Writing down lists allows me to conceptualize things and understand the big picture of football,” McLaurin said.
“When you’re young, you can just get absorbed in your work. But if you start learning conceptually and understand why, it gives you more information to be successful.”
Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes has developed a weekly routine in which he takes typed notes from his coaching staff and painstakingly transcribes them by hand.
“It helps me remember,” Mahomes told reporters in 2024. “So I’ll write it and rewrite everything.”
Taking notes helps to improve memory; It’s part of what experts call an encoding function. But according to Flannigan, it’s more of the same for exam cramming. People forget the information within weeks or months.
For example, in one study, one group of students took notes in class and only later read them again, while another group took no notes and then received a teacher-provided note to study. Both groups performed about the same.
Instead, Flanigan’s research has shown that the best practice for using notes is to write by hand first and then use what he calls “retrieval-based learning.”
A classic involves trying to remember every note you took down during a class or meeting the day before, then comparing what you remember to the original notes. Another involves reorganizing your notes by adding mental associations based on what you already know, or generating new ideas using notes.
In another way, though, soccer players may have an advantage over regular students because of the concept of “fresh knowledge,” or how emotions can influence thinking, decision-making, and memory.
For Mendoza, that’s one of the biggest reasons he takes notes. He started his first season. Behind the oldest Kirk relatives And he tries to absorb every aspect of playing quarterback in the NFL.
If he writes down a pass play in which he throws an interception during practice, for example, he’s more likely to remember it.
“When you’re upset about it, you’re more focused and you think about not making that mistake again,” he told reporters.
