What college football can teach us about learning in athletics and academics
Metacognition is to academics what athleticism is to sports. Both govern how effectively a performer learns, adjusts, and thrives within demanding environments.
I got to test this assertion more than fifteen years ago.
In 2010, I launched a study hall program for student-athletes at Lenoir-Rhyne University, in Hickory, NC. Tensions between faculty and athletic coaches were so high that the Provost and Vice President of Athletics asked me to overhaul the existing academic support model.
My student leaders and I developed a metacognitive-based model that identified ways players of all sports could transfer the complex thinking and learning they routinely used in their sport to their academics.
- In 2011, the student-athletes skyrocketed to the top of the conference academic honor roll, with football doubling the number of players who made the 3.2 minimum GPA.
- By 2013, the student-athlete GPA surpassed the general student GPA.
- By 2014, faculty were presenting at conferences on the joys of teaching student-athletes.
- By 2015, several athletic teams had won national academic honors and recognitions, and colleges and universities began visiting the institution to learn about the program.
During this era, the university experienced unprecedented academic and athletic success—capturing national championships, contending for titles, and leading their conferences. It was a true cultural transformation. I was honored to help lead it.
In 2015, I transitioned from the institution to bring this metacognitive model to other colleges and universities, where the approach has produced similar transformative results.
Well, football is back, and I just met with my alma mater’s football team. I asked these players the same thing I asked the team fifteen years ago: to think about something they probably don’t hear very often: football may be one of the most intellectually demanding things they do in college.
Think about this: one of the first resources a college football player receives is a playbook. That playbook contains concepts, schemes, formations, terminology, and plays. The player has to learn that information, understand how the pieces fit together, recognize formations, remember assignments, and know when particular concepts and plays apply.
Practice adds another layer. Players have to communicate what they know, anticipate what is coming, diagnose what is actually happening, select an appropriate response, and execute it—often in a matter of seconds. By game day, they are performing all of this against opponents who have spent the week studying their tendencies and deliberately developing ways to confuse, overwhelm, and exploit them.
The learning cycle continues after the final whistle. Players review film, identify what went right and wrong, and try to make an accurate attribution about why. Was the problem a missed read, poor technique, a bad decision, or a misunderstanding of the concept? Their judgment matters because what they learn from that review has to alter what they notice and do the next time.
There is something else interesting about this work: much of it is performed in the open. Successes, errors, decisions, and missed assignments can be seen by coaches, teammates, spectators, and sometimes thousands of people watching on television. A player’s understanding is not merely reported; it is repeatedly exposed through performance.
Put that beside the typical academic environment and the comparison gets interesting. In organic chemistry, the molecule isn’t disguising its intentions. In calculus, the derivative didn’t spend the week watching film on you, and your history professor isn’t changing the question at the line of scrimmage because she noticed a weakness in your coverage. In a technical course, the electrical circuit isn’t deliberately rewiring itself to exploit your misunderstanding, and the CNC machine isn’t studying your tendencies before you approach it.
In fact, the professor is on your team.
So I told the players, If you can learn football at this level, you should be A students in college.
Look at what they are learning
The comparison becomes easier to see when we look at the artifacts of learning rather than the uniforms of the learners.
Football starts with concepts. The unseen ideas are the hidden infrastructure of the sport.
These concepts are then communicated through various forms of content, as illustrated in the slide below.
Football learning requires players to organize terminology, concepts, assignments, cues, and changing conditions into usable performance.
Now put those pages beside academic study notes.
The subject matter is different, but both learners are trying to convert dense specialized knowledge into something they can recognize, retrieve, connect, and use.
The point is not that football and chemistry are intellectually identical. They obviously are not. What interests me is the similarity in the work the learner has to perform: determining what matters, organizing information, establishing the right relationships, recognizing patterns, connecting concepts, retrieving knowledge when needed, and using it under conditions that do not always look exactly like practice.
That helps explain why three characteristics of athletic learning deserve our attention. Football players routinely learn complex systems; they practice in ways increasingly designed to resemble eventual performance; and they continuously monitor results and adjust. Research on self-regulated learning in sport has likewise identified planning, strategy selection, monitoring, attribution, reflection, and adaptation as important parts of developing expertise.
From “What?” to “Why?” to “How?”
More than a decade ago, Patricia Alexander’s Model of Domain Learning gave me a useful way of thinking about this progression. Her model describes development from acclimation toward competence and ultimately proficiency in a domain. What caught my attention then was how easily that progression could be observed on a football field.
A beginning player spends enormous cognitive energy on what: Where do I line up? What is the call? Which gap is mine? As competence develops, the questions increasingly become about why: Why does my leverage matter? Why are we forcing the ball here? Why does my assignment change when the formation changes?
Eventually, sophisticated performance demands how: How do I use what I understand when the offense gives me something I have not practiced in exactly this form? At that point, the player is no longer simply retrieving an instruction. He is recognizing, interpreting, judging, adapting, and executing.
Coaches often describe the resulting player as someone who has begun to play faster. Some of that improvement is physical, but most of it is cognitive. The player who can quickly analyze and evaluate information will play faster and better, partciularly in key situations.
The underlying capacity
That brings me to the idea I have been thinking about since meeting with that team.
Athleticism supports specialized performance across sports. Metacognition can play a comparable role across academic domains.
Athleticism is not football. It is not basketball, volleyball, soccer, baseball, or swimming. It is a collection of underlying capacities—coordination, balance, agility, speed, reaction, body awareness—that can make learning and performing specialized athletic tasks more manageable.
Metacognition is not organic chemistry, calculus, history, engineering, or writing either. It involves knowledge and regulation of one’s own cognitive activity: understanding the task, planning an approach, monitoring whether that approach is working, and adjusting when needed. Research has consistently correlated metacognitive skills with academic achievement, reinforcing the importance of this underlying learning capacity.
The analogy has an important limit. Athleticism does not remove the need to learn football, and metacognition does not remove the need to learn chemistry. An exceptional athlete still needs sport-specific knowledge and practice; a highly metacognitive learner still needs disciplinary knowledge, concepts, and techniques.
But both provide resources for learning, regulating, adapting, and performing within specialized environments.
Metacognition is academic athleticism.
And that leaves us with a question that may be more interesting than asking why a particular athlete is struggling academically: If this sophisticated learner is clearly present on the field, why doesn’t that learner always appear in the classroom?
Between 2010 and 2015, we answered that question at Lenoir-Rhyne. Each semester, when surveyed on whether their new metacognitive tools and skills helped in the classroom and in their sport, an overwhelming majority confirmed they did.
And that is where your part begins. You don’t need a survey; start with a question.
Start the Conversation
With a student-athlete: Think of something in your sport that used to feel complicated but now feels almost automatic. What changed in the way you understand it—not just in how many times you practiced it?
With someone supporting student-athletes: When an athlete struggles academically, how often do our conversations begin with what the student cannot do rather than investigating the sophisticated learning processes the student already uses elsewhere?
With athletic coaches: How much of your team’s success or failure comes down to mental errors and missed assignments, rather than physical limitations?
Bibliography
Alexander, P. A. (2003). The development of expertise: The journey from acclimation to proficiency. Educational Researcher, 32(8), 10–14. doi:10.3102/0013189X032008010.
Cleary, T. J., & Zimmerman, B. J. (2001). Self-regulation differences during athletic practice by experts, non-experts, and novices. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 13(2), 185–206. doi:10.1080/104132001753149883.
McCardle, L., Young, B. W., & Baker, J. (2019). Self-regulated learning and expertise development in sport: Current status, challenges, and future opportunities. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 12(1), 112–138. doi:10.1080/1750984X.2017.1381141.
Veenman, M. V. J., Van Hout-Wolters, B. H. A. M., & Afflerbach, P. (2006). Metacognition and learning: Conceptual and methodological considerations. Metacognition and Learning, 1, 3–14. doi:10.1007/s11409-006-6893-0.
