The Super Bowl is one of the world’s most significant single-day sporting events.
It attracts over 100 million U.S. viewers and [tens of millions of international viewers], making it an entertainment phenomenon. For Eagles fans who are not making the trip to the Superdome in New Orleans, there will be plenty of places to watch in Philadelphia – including rowdy bars, living rooms and even home tailgates, all while the city is lit in Eagles green.
For me, the Super Bowl is a real-life laboratory. As a sports scientist, neuropsychology professor and the former athletic director at Drexel University in Philadelphia, I investigate how high-performance athletes prepare cognitively and psychologically for a winning performance on game day.
When the stakes are at their highest, what can psychology reveal about who is mentally prepared to win the Super Bowl?
Tough-minded and open to experience
Research suggests that super-elite athletes are tough-minded and not easily rattled.
Their psychological profiles look similar to those of high-performance solo classical guitarists or fighter pilots. On personality tests, athletes typically score at least average in extroversion, openness and agreeableness, and high in conscientiousness.
Professional athletes work incredibly hard and are disciplined, well organized, goal-oriented, reliable and generally sociable.
A new focus in personality research in competitive athletes is on creativity and, specifically, being open to experience, which includes being receptive to new ideas and being flexible.
Openness has become increasingly important in the modern blueprint for winning football games. Daniel Memmert, a sports scientist at German Sport University Cologne, calls this “tactical creativity.” It is a cognitive style that allows one to be imaginative and engage in divergent thinking – which is an ability to think flexibly outside of routines and devise multiple solutions – even in real-time competitive situations.
Divergent thinking in high-performance sports includes focusing on the task at hand and paying attention to relevant information while ignoring irrelevant information in the athletic arena. The creative athlete knows when and where to look in order to win a play or avoid a costly error.
Creative and cool under pressure
Creativity is essential in unscripted football plays – when a planned play has not been executed properly, like a fumble or an interception.
Intentionally distracting your opponent has become an important part of sports competition. It is why quarterbacks often change the play at the line of scrimmage. But it becomes even more critical during improvised offensive plays when everything is unscripted. In a sport where milliseconds matter, being creative and engaging in something your opponent doesn’t expect can be the difference between winning and losing.
When the Eagles won the Super Bowl in 2018, backup quarterback Nick Foles calmly executed a…