Fewer people take notes by hand. Not Fernando Mendoza and the NFL

This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.

It was supposed to be a casual lunch, just a chance to network with an NFL legend and influential rapper.

But when Fernando Mendoza, the rookie quarterback of the Las Vegas Raiders, sat down with Tom Brady and Travis Scott earlier this year, he couldn’t help himself. He wrote down everything on a notepad.

At just 22 years old, Mendoza has earned plenty of accolades: college football national champion, Heisman Trophy winner and No. 1 pick. Yet if the NFL gave out an award for copious note-taking, he’d be in the running for that, too.

At Christopher Columbus High School in Miami, Mendoza took notes on his team’s practice plan during the lunch hour. At Cal, his first college stop before transferring to Indiana, he was known for carrying old-school computational notebooks everywhere. And when Mendoza attended his first NFL offseason activities this summer, he carefully wrote out every pass play longhand, listing the formation, pass progression and footwork.

The habit is so ingrained that Mike Pawlawski — a former Cal quarterback and radio analyst — once recalled Mendoza reaching for the notebook during dinners at his house.

Mendoza, who is set to begin the season as the Raiders’ backup, is not the only quarterback or football player with a habit of taking notes by hand. In fact, as the world has become increasingly digital — reliant on laptops, tablets and the Notes app — the NFL remains a bastion of old-school note-taking.

One veteran NFL player estimated that 75 to 80 percent of players still take notes by hand.

There are plenty of benefits to writing longhand. The process of taking notes can help with memory and recall. Handwriting is slower than typing, which forces people to summarize and rephrase a teacher or coach’s point in their own words. The synthesis can help with understanding. But the biggest benefit for learning is in what educational psychologists call the “external storage function,” a fancy term for a simple idea: taking notes creates a document to review.

In fact, years of research on college students has shown that taking notes by hand can lead to better learning outcomes and higher grades than typewritten notes — but only when students engage in a detailed review process.

“Just taking notes isn’t enough to promote deep, meaningful, long-term attention,” said Abraham E. Flanigan, an assistant professor in educational psychology at the University of Georgia.

It’s one of the fascinating aspects of note-taking. In a vacuum, it doesn’t matter if students take notes by hand or by typing; if they do nothing else, each group will perform about the same. But if each group also engages in a larger review process, then students who take notes by hand tend to perform better.

One theoretical reason, Flanigan said, is that taking notes by hand creates a more meaningful and deeply processed record of information from a class lecture or meeting.  This serves as a better trigger — or mental prompt — for students when they review them later.

Another reason is that people can type faster than they can write, allowing students to record what is being said verbatim on a computer while not thinking about the material. But writing notes by hand requires a more engaged mental filter.

“To be able to do that, a person has to think deeply enough about the content to be able to understand it,” said Daniel Oppenheimer, a professor of psychology and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon. “And being forced to think about and understand it helps people learn the material better.”

Terry McLaurin, a two-time Pro Bowl receiver for the Washington Commanders, said he maintains a notebook each day, jotting down details from practice and meetings, and then reviews it every night before bed in preparation for the next day.

“Writing down the details allows me to see things conceptually and allows me to understand the big picture of football,” McLaurin said.

“When you’re younger, you can get so bogged down in just your job. But if you can start learning conceptually and understand why, it just gives you more information to have success.”

Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes developed a weekly routine in which he took typed notes the coaching staff provided and then painstakingly copied them by hand.

“It helps me remember it,” Mahomes told reporters in 2024. “So I’ll write it down, and then I’ll rewrite everything again.”

Copying down notes can help with memory recall; it’s part of what experts call an encoding function. But according to Flanigan, it’s more akin to cramming for a test. In weeks or months, people tend to forget the information.

In one study, for instance, one group of students took notes by hand in class and only re-read them later, while another group didn’t take any notes and then received instructor-provided notes to study. Both groups performed about the same.

Instead, Flanigan said research has found that the best practice for utilizing notes is to write them by hand first and then engage a strategy he calls “retrieval-based learning.”

A classic one includes trying to recall, from memory, every note you wrote during a class or meeting earlier in the day, then comparing what you remembered to your original notes. Another includes restructuring your notes while adding mental associations based on what you already know or using the notes to generate new ideas.

In another way, though, football players might have an advantage over regular students because of a concept called “hot cognition,” or the idea that emotion can influence thinking, decision-making and memory.

For Mendoza, that’s one of the biggest reasons he takes notes. He’s starting his first season behind veteran quarterback Kirk Cousins and will be trying to soak up every aspect of playing quarterback in the NFL.

If he writes down a pass play in which he threw an interception during practice, for example, he’s more likely to remember it.

“When you’re frustrated about it,” he told reporters, “you’re going to put more focus and intent on not making that mistake again.”