I think in all the years I have been writing about Penn State football, I have never heard so much talk about overthinking. I could be wrong. But I don’t want to overthink it.
There was this on Saturday from senior quarterback Drew Allar, 41 games and a couple mil into his Penn State career, while riding a three-credit final semester:
“I’m just overthinking it. In reality, I made that throw [an incomplete bubble screen to Nick Singleton] all week in practice. So, it’s just going out there and shutting my brain and going out and playing. As frustrating as it is, I know it’s easily correctable.”
And this on Monday from James Franklin, owner of an undergraduate degree in psychology from East Stroudsburg and a master’s in educational leadership from Washington State, and a highly successful Power 4 head coach for 15 years, about the aforementioned Singleton, a career 3,000-yard rusher who is 43 games into his Penn State career:
“I had a conversation with Nick. A little bit like Drew, I think he was thinking too much.”
And there’s this definition of “overthinking” from my Google AI, the easiest place to look without much thinking:
“Overthinking is a cycle of repetitive and unproductive thoughts, often called rumination when focused on the past, or worry when focused on the future, where individuals dwell excessively on a problem or situation without finding a solution. This can stem from anxiety, perfectionism, low self-esteem, or a need for control and can lead to indecision, anxiety, stress, and mental exhaustion. Common signs include replaying conversations, second-guessing decisions, and difficulty concentrating on anything else.”
I’ve heard more promising ED commercials.
Whatever it is, overthinking doesn’t sound good. Especially when it comes to two of the most experienced, most talented, most amiable and most well-compensated players on the roster of the No. 2 team in college football that is striving — too hard? — to win the program’s first national championship in 39 years.
Without a lot of overthinking, I’m thinking that’s a lot of pressure. Especially when your head coach — who no doubt thinks the world of you, as a person and a player, both for good reasons — tells the world about it.
But, it doesn’t matter what I think. With so much overthinking going on with Penn State football lately — despite of or because of its lopsided (a combined 80-11) but less-than-inspiring performances against less-than-sterling competition — I needed a Ph.D. to help me cut through the clutter.
So, I decided to seek out an expert, to see what they think about Overthinking and Sport. Because when James Franklin — a former college QB, a college coach for three decades and a head coach who has won 127 games — starts talking about his top players overthinking, with Oregon and Dan Lanning and national TV and a WhiteOut on the horizon, I think we all need some clear thinking.
I was fortunate to find the right PSU man for the job: Dr. Andrew Friesen at Penn State Berks. He is an associate professor of kinesiology, with research expertise in emotional intelligence and the applied practice of sports psychology.
“I study emotions and emotion control in sport,” Dr. Friesen said when we chatted via Zoom on Wednesday. He is a Certified Mental Performance Consultant (CMPC) with the Association for Applied Sports Psychology. He’s not just some pointy-headed academic, either. At Penn State Berks, he is the college’s Faculty Athletics Representative, working closely with a variety of teams and coaches.
So, here’s what Dr. Friesen thinks about overthinking. One caveat: He wanted to make clear that we were talking about elite athletes in general, and not any Penn State football players. I think you’ll get his point.
10 DEEP THOUGHTS WITH DR. FRIESEN
1. WHAT IS OVERTHINKING? “Oftentimes, it can take many different names. You can throw out the word choking. There is a cognitive element to it and a focus element to it. Coaches and athletes can’t always articulate what is going on, and because they are not Ph.D.’s in sports pysch, they fall back on these buzzwords like ‘mental toughness,’ which means everything and nothing at the same time. The same with ‘overthinking,’ which can mean a lot of different things — and because of that, doesn’t mean anything. At the end of the day, the coaches and athletes have to say something to the question that is asked of them, so they end up using words like grit, hardiness and mental toughness.”
2. IS CHANGE POSSIBLE? “Absolutely. That’s what sports psychologists do. We look at someone’s psychological and emotional profile and, in the same way a strength and conditioning coach might train muscles to become bigger, you’re training athletes to become more resilient, and to find a level of emotional and cognitive excellence that doesn’t come at the sacrifice of themselves. Sports psychology is different than regular psychology — our main focus is performance, recognizing that what we do for performance may not be the best thing we do for ourselves holistically.”
3. BUT…IT CAN TAKE AWHILE: “I don’t think we have an appreciation for how long that change can take. Continuing with the strength and conditioning metaphor: If you go to the strength coach and say, ‘Hey, I have this big game this weekend and I need to put on 10 pounds of muscle,’ there’s no way you are going to do that in two or three days. You need six months to build that up.
“It is the same way with mental training. I get a lot of requests, ‘Hey, my son is in a big game this weekend, can you tell him something to make him feel more confident?’ No, I have no magic words for you. I can work with them systematically. Just like physical training, we need a runway.”
4. EMBRACE FAILURE. “Fundamentally, we’re often trying to change their relationship with a sport and often with failure. For the most part, people who are struggling mentally, they have a very adverse relationship with failure — they try to avoid it. Whereas, the best athletes, the most elite athletes, they recognize that failure is part of the process. Failure is the best teacher. Which means you can’t avoid it. You have to embrace it. You may still feel embarrassed or be angry, but that doesn’t mean those feelings aren’t helpful. It takes quite a bit of time.”
5. “LEARNING OCCURS OUTSIDE THE COMFORT ZONE. Learning is a miserable process, because we are confronted with our weaknesses…often in the presence of others. We have to love failure enough to embrace it.”
6. HAVE A GOOD BAD DAY. “High performance in athletics is learning to have a good bad day. That’s what sport is. We’re going to make mistakes when competing against someone who is trying to sabotage us. Even Tom Brady and Peyton Manning didn’t go 30 for 30. There are going to be mistakes.”
7. CHANGING MOTIVATIONS IN THE NIL ERA. “There are two types of motivation. There’s extrinsic — money, rewards and fame. And we have intrinsic motivation, which is the love of the game and the love of the actual experience of the game. As extrinsic rewards go up, there is a tendency for intrinsic rewards to get washed away. This is human nature. “
8. NEW PRESSURES: “With more money being thrown around, you have more and other vested interests and people involved. And you have more people putting more pressure on these young kids.”
9. PLAY THE BEST. “We enjoy being challenged. What is the point of developing these skills, if there is no monster to slay? If you want to play sport just to win, go play against a bunch of 5-year-olds and engage in your masturbation of ego as you slaughter them.”
10. TOO MANY VOICES? At Penn State’s practices, I sometimes see as many as five coaches working with the quarterbacks — Franklin, QB coach Danny O’Brien, Trace McSorley, offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki and analyst James Urban. I shared this observation with Dr. Friesen.
His reply: “It seems to me to be the kind of workplace that would foster overthinking. There is a chain, the military chain of command, so the rank and file hear one voice. There needs to be one message, one thing they need to do.”
