Inside the obsessive note-taking and methods of a Hall of Famer

“One of my favorite parts of the game was the preparation side of it,” Kuechly said while unveiling that notebook at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in April, in perhaps the biggest understatement in the history of football.

“So, we prepared. Obviously you get done with the game Sunday, you come in on Monday, you hit your lift, you look at the tape from the previous game, and then boom, your preparation starts on Monday. I’ve got one of my notebooks behind here, and they were all structured exactly the same way all eight years I was playing.

“And how I structured my week was Monday I’d watch two first halves of the team we were playing. So if we were playing the Arizona Cardinals, I’d watch the first half of two separate games. And the reason I watched the first half of two separate games was that you got a real feel for what the offense wanted to be. Sometimes in games, if teams get up big or if they’re down big, their offense changes. You don’t really see what they are. So the goal of that was to get a feel for who they were and see what kind of players they had. So if you’re playing the Cardinals, you talk about their front, their offensive line, the running backs, and then there’s a guy out on the edge, number 11, that we got to know where he is, and that’s Larry (Fitzgerald). So you get a good feel for personnel, and you’re just clicking through, taking some initial notes, finding the players on the team that had tremendous impacts, and then as the week went on, I had a whole, a whole slated schedule for what I would do.

“So Tuesday was a particular thing. Wednesday was a particular thing. I looked at Thursday, Friday, and then again on Saturday was my review day. So everything I took notes on in my notebook, and when Saturday would come around, I’d review everything. So I’d start on Monday, the Monday page, and I’d review everything on Monday and then I’d take our game plan with, with that with that notebook and all right, say we’re in this in this formation, this down and distance, boom, this is likely our call and then I’d go through that play in my mind as if we were going to play in the game the next day.

“So the notebook allowed me to write everything down. If I write stuff down, I remember it way better. And sometimes I write it down multiple times, so in some of those notebooks you’ll see the same thing written multiple times because if I write it down once I’ll forget, so I’ve got to write it down multiple times. So this notebook, I think it’s taped, it’s taped on the, on the spine because it would go everywhere with me. But I liked that notebook. It was good luck, so of course I had to keep that one. But those notebooks, I had a million of them. I still have all of them with me, and they had all of my notes, all of my thoughts. Our game plan, everything in there, and then on Saturday that was my favorite thing to re-look through the whole week and get myself ready to go for the game.”