The point-guard mentality didn’t just make Sam Darnold better. It’s a useful mental trick – The Athletic
This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.
When Sam Darnold arrived in San Francisco before the 2023 season, his NFL career was at a crossroads. The third pick in 2018, he had washed out amidst the managerial ineptitude of the New York Jets and spent two unsatisfying seasons with the Carolina Panthers. His career opportunities drying up, he signed with the 49ers to back up Brock Purdy, a quarterback whose path resembled his polar opposite.
The last pick of the 2022 draft, Purdy’s career had unfolded like a fairy tale — an unlikely trip to the NFC Championship in Year 1, a Super Bowl appearance in Year 2. Listed at a generous 6 feet 1 and athletically nondescript, Purdy was perpetually overlooked and consistently successful, and at some point during the 2023 season, he shared a piece of advice that lodged itself in Darnold’s brain.
One secret to playing quarterback in the NFL was to think like a point guard, to put the ball in the hands of your playmakers and set up others to have success.
“Like, my job is just to play point and get the ball in their hands and let them go do great things with the rock,” Darnold told reporters in March, relaying the message. “When I changed my thought process as a quarterback to kind of just getting the ball in my guys’ hands, that’s really where it unlocked for me.”
It might sound like Purdy was arguing for a change in style. But rather he was outlining a shift in mindset, a mental trick to simplify the position, an idea that can be expanded beyond the sports realm — the power of the point-guard mentality.
The argument: When people stop thinking of themselves as the hero in their personal narrative — and instead focus on how they can set up others — their own performance can benefit.
For Darnold, the change in mentality was a catalyst for a breakout season in Minnesota in 2024 — where he threw for 35 touchdowns and won 14 games — and another excellent season for the Seattle Seahawks, where he again won 14 games and has the Seahawks in Sunday’s NFC championship game against the Los Angeles Rams.
Think like a point guard.
It’s an easy metaphor. The point guard requires vision, selflessness and tactical awareness. They are, by positional requirement, facilitators and distributors, often asked to see the whole floor and initiate the action. But they don’t have to do it all; they just have to put others in a place to succeed.
To have a steady and selfless point guard is often to have a thriving team culture, a lesson that former NBA coach Phil Jackson learned during his first seasons with the Chicago Bulls.
Jackson first joined the Bulls staff as an assistant in 1987, when Michael Jordan was one of the most electric scorers in NBA history. One consequence of Jordan’s dominance was that his teammates often faded into the background and became passive observers.
To solve the issue, then Bulls head coach Doug Collins moved Jordan to point guard during the 1988-89 season. In theory, Jordan would need to think more about creating opportunities for others, which would lift his teammates.
The gambit worked — to a degree. Jordan’s scoring average dropped as other players emerged. But when the Bulls lost the Eastern Conference finals to the Pistons and Jackson was elevated to head coach, the answer came in the form of the triangle offense, a scheme conceived by assistant Tex Winter, where movement flows and everyone shares the ball.
The offense, Jackson wrote in his seminal book, “Sacred Hoops,” came to embody the “Zen Christian attitude of selfless awareness.”
It may sound like a stretch, but to put it another way, Jackson wanted everyone to think like a point guard.
“It was awareness in action,” he wrote.
This may sound like pure vibes from Jackson, the famed Zen Master. But according to the theory of cognitive load, an idea developed in the 1980s by Australian educational psychologist John Sweller, there is value in using a simple mental shortcut to execute a complex task, like playing quarterback in the NFL.
Every athlete, regardless of sport, faces three types of cognitive load — or mental strain — during competition:
- The intrinsic load, or the inherent challenge of the task
- The extraneous load, or the extra mental effort caused by poor coaching or chaotic systems
- The germane load, or the effort used to create “schemas,” or mental shortcuts that simplify a task
According to Sweller’s theory, the most efficient athletes have schemas that reduce the intrinsic load — mental tricks that simplify technique or calm the mind during complex processing. It could be as basic as reframing your responsibility — or streamlining a thought process: Get the ball in their hands and let them go do great things with the rock.
To a lesser extent, researchers have found that when people focus on altruistic behavior, they tend to experience a boost in their happiness level, with the effect most prominent in cultures that focus on the individual.
It would be foolish to think that an athlete could improve their performance simply by being more selfless. But in the midst of a zero-sum competition, the research suggests that thinking selflessly can boost mood and keep athletes in a positive frame of mind.
For Darnold, it meant not feeling like he had to be superman and make every big play. He came to understand when a play was dead. He learned to avoid turnovers, to find the safe outlets in the passing scheme, and let his teammates make plays.
It helped, of course, that he was surrounded by a stable system, which only reinforced the mentality. He just needed to facilitate — a much simpler framework.
“You can’t be a quarterback and fake it,” Purdy told reporters last week, before his Niners lost to the Seahawks. “Guys can sniff that out. He’s a guy that’s gone to two different places and built up cultures, where they’re winning cultures.”
To this point, Darnold has not always been perfect in big games. Last year, the Vikings were steamrolled by the Detroit Lions in a pivotal Week 18 matchup that decided the NFC North race before losing 27-9 to the Rams in the wild-card round. Maybe he again tried to do too much.
But he has a chance this weekend, for the first time in his career, to guide a team to the Super Bowl.
