CHARLOTTE — If you want to be good at football like Luke Kuechly, you need size and strength and speed and the willingness to spend more time thinking about and preparing for football than anyone else, and the kind of instincts to see things before they happen.

Also, a Uniball Signo 207 Micro.

Actually, a lot of Uniball Signo 207 Micros. Probably hundreds of Uniball Signo 207 Micros, if not thousands.

"That was a pen that I liked that I found," Kuechly said. "Every now and then you'd try a new one, and it's like 'This one's not it.'"

You uncover this bit of information because it's written in a corner of one of Luke Kuechly's notebooks, along with a lot of plays he considered, digested, and internalized before opponents ever ran them. And those notebooks may contain the secret to his success, though the way Luke Kuechly became good at football is no secret; he just worked at it more than everyone else.

And right there, sharing the same piece of paper as Open Fire 9 and Odd Husky Dog, the peel calls and the hieroglyphics of NFL play design, with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, you'll see Uniball Signo 207 Micro scribbled in his tiny, precise handwriting.

Because that week, apparently, in addition to needing to know where the tight end usually was when the Eagles ran to the open side of the field, Luke Kuechly was almost out of Uniball Signo 207 Micros and needed to order some more.

You realize quickly when you start looking through notebooks with Luke Kuechly that it's not the note itself that's important, or even that notebook. Because he was a man of many notebooks. He'd blow through about five of the standard-issue team notebooks a season, but he also had what he called "trash notebooks."

Those were for scribbling the same information many times. Over and over and over.

"And it just was like chaos," he laughed. "If you looked at it, you'd be like, 'What the hell is the problem with this guy?'

"But I would have to write it, right? Because then I would remember it."

When Luke Kuechly is trying to learn something new, he has to write it down, again and again and again. So those trash notebooks were actually treasures, because that kind of rote learning as he wrote helped him develop into one of the greatest linebackers of all time.

And perhaps in an effort to not contribute to deforestation, because he does love the outdoors, Kuechly also had a small whiteboard that he'd carry around with him for the same purpose.

"I had this problem," Kuechly began. "We put a defense in one time and it, it needs to make sense in my mind. And if it doesn't make sense in my mind, I can't do it. So I love the whiteboards. We had these little whiteboards, and I had to write. I sat down; it was on a Wednesday. (Linebackers coach) Al Holcomb sent us this new play on a Tuesday. He'd always send us all the new stuff on Tuesday, so I could sit at home on Tuesday and check over everything.

"So then on Wednesday, I showed up, I was good to go. I walked out on practice on that Wednesday, and I got it wrong like 10 times in the morning. And they're like, we're going to scrap this because you can't do it. I'm like, just give me one more day, because the concept behind this, this defense that they put in was really good.

"So I'm not going to be the limiting factor on us being able to do this defense. So I just sat with my whiteboard and with my notebook and just drew and drew and drew and drew and drew until it made sense in my mind. And then once it made sense in my mind, I was good."

And once Luke Kuechly was good, the defense usually was too.

"It comes back to, if I can come back and see it, I can do it," former Panthers head coach Ron Rivera said. "And as a coach, you have to decide if I made it harder than it really is, and I'd like to believe that through that conversation, they came to, 'This is how we're going to do it.' So you have somebody that's willing to challenge you and say, 'Look, I'm not seeing it. Can you explain it another way?' I think that helps you. And I think that's what they try to get across.

"Him, I think he was trying to find out exactly what they wanted. But at the same time, 'If I tweak it this way, do I still get what you want?' And that's how you come to the right way to do things, I believe."

Former defensive coordinator Sean McDermott, who coached Kuechly for six seasons before getting a head coaching job in Buffalo, said he realized that if he heard rustling of paper in a meeting, it was from Kuechly flipping over a page of his notebook to write something supplemental on the back.

"I vividly remember he'd have his notebook, it'd already be written in, and when you flip the cover back, it's just two sides," McDermott said. "It's not laying out like this. He would have it always flipped back. So he'd be right here, then there'd be a pause, and we're talking, and then I'd say something, and he'd go flip it over and, there he goes writing again.

"And I'm sure you've made the rounds talking to opponents and opposing coaches; he drove them crazy because they had to change code words, colors, terminology, whatever it was, because he's calling it out. 'Hey, Thomas, they're going here, they're going here.' And that's how he did it."

If you start Luke Kuechly talking about his notebooks, you better give yourself some time, because he can talk about this for a long time.

How much time did you spend on those books every week?

"A lot," Kuechly replied quickly, and then spent a solid six minutes of talking, breaking down his daily note-taking habits. A clinician might call it compulsive, because he goes into such detail, six years removed from his final game of NFL football.

The notebook he included in his Hall of Fame exhibit was from 2019, his final season.

"It was at the top of the box," he said.

That week, they were playing the Houston Texans, and at the beginning of the section for the Texans, he listed six points of emphasis for himself.

1. Body Language
2. PMA
3. effort to ball
4. Stay Relaxed
5. Aggressive @ ball
6. Play Ahead of Play — i.e. Jaws from practice

There's a lot to unpack there, Luke, but what is PMA?

"Positive mental attitude," he replied. "Yeah, because I needed that sometimes."

That would become more important as the 2019 season went along, but Luke reminding himself of things like that alongside the football detail is also a window into his preparation.

"What that also did, though, was everyone else in the room watched how meticulously he took notes and how he studied, and it just kind of carried on through and affected the other players in a positive way," Holcomb said.

"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."

Believe it or not, that's the short version of that story, because that was his word-for-word introduction to a museum full of tourists in April.

Start asking him for details in a more private setting, and you get even more detail, the kind of granular football that it's easy to obsess over if you're wired that way.

Respectfully, Luke Kuechly, you're kind of a nerd.

"Oh, hell yeah," he agreed. "It's the best."

Want to know what kind of nerd Luke Kuechly is? He treats his hobbies with the same attention to detail.

Colin Jones was a safety and a special teamer on some of those great Panthers defenses, and is one of Kuechly's closest friends. (He was supposed to be there the night Julius Peppers delivered the news of his induction, but he was out of town so Andy Dalton subbed in for him). They share a passion for the outdoors, and were hunting white-tailed deer in Texas when Kuechly told him he was retiring in January of 2020.

"Bow hunting, it's similar to football, and it was a good way to transition out of football because it's really hard," Jones said. "And it's not necessarily about the hunting. It's more about the preparation and the work and putting in the time to be a really good shot with a bow. And just getting out, that's a way to keep the camaraderie and locker room vibe. We found that it still works for us."

Jones has spent a lot of time with Kuechly in the field and in the locker room, so he knows what makes his friend tick.

"Yeah, it's competitive, too; You want to be the best version of yourself, 100 percent," Jones added. "I remember while we were playing, we would always watch film after, and obviously, nobody logged more time at the facility than Luke just getting in as much as he could.

"Every once in a while, we would take some breaks when we couldn't hunt because football season aligned nearly exactly with white-tailed deer season in the Midwest, but we'd always look at buddy's trail camera pictures and live vicariously through them."

Luke Kuechly even watches film to hunt.

"Of course he does," Jones laughed.

And the coaches were right, that kind of attention to detail did rub off on everyone.

If there was ever a player who could have gotten by on ability alone, it was quarterback Cam Newton — not that Newton didn't prepare; he did, just not to the level Kuechly did. Then again, no one went that far.

"There was one time that I was there that I felt very confident with my preparation that specific day," Newton recalled. "As I was leaving the facility, I just decided to do a room check because certain rooms will have snacks that other teammates or rooms didn't have. Because it was the rookie's job to replenish the snacks, and I would always leave it up to TD (Thomas Davis) to surprise me by having his guys go get good snacks.

"So I went into the linebacker meeting room. And all you hear is buttons smashing, and it was an Xbox controller (that the Panthers used to use to control the film on the screen). And that's all you would hear, and you would see a screen, a person so close to the screen, and then he would just jot notes, and then 'Boom.'

"And I'm like. You know what? Bump them snacks. I'm going back. I think Luke didn't realize how much he impacted me. He set a standard, and the standard is the expectation that you set or any expectation that is set. I wanted to be the best. I gave him enough respect to know that he is one of the best, not just amongst his peers, but just by the plays that he made. And if I could not allow him to intercept my pass or to stay longer than I did, those were just small competitive things that he may have never known until now that I've always implemented, and it didn't make me dislike him.

"I appreciate him for setting the bar that everybody had to meet."

That had to start somewhere, and as with most things Luke Kuechly, that was in Cincinnati.

When he put on football pads for the fourth time for the St. Saviour Golden Bears, coach Kevin Harris had to teach him the basics.

"That first week, we're in shorts, we probably went five days that week, first of August, hot, miserable, and that's what we're doing," Harris said. "We're teaching them, walking through how to tackle, how to block your first couple of steps — all the fundamentals.

"Your stance is so important, and we spent a lot of time that first week just going over discipline, like when the quarterback's handing the ball off to the running back, the running back's eyes have to be up. They can't be looking down to get the ball into their belly. They've got to be disciplined enough and fundamentally sound enough to keep their eyes up and trust the quarterback is going to put that ball right in their belly, and keep their eyes up and looking.

"This is a whole new sport to them. I mean, these kids have never played tackle football. They played two-hand touch maybe. The proper way to play football, you've got to teach them that."

So during a scrimmage, Kuechly jumped offside, and Kuechly was sent to run around the scoreboard (or a light pole, or a tree, depends on who's telling the story). When he got back, he began pestering his coach until he was sent for another lap.

"I just wanted to get back in the game," Kuechly said.

He wanted more reps so he didn't make the mistake again.

Then when he got to high school at St. Xavier, he developed a habit for watching film that drew a crowd, and coach Steve Specht had to abandon his own office, so Kuechly and his followers could watch more film.

"He wanted to learn, and he wanted to grow," Specht said. "He asked great questions. It would start with, 'This is a formation. Take a look at, watch this, that.' Well, then he would start asking me more questions and then he would take the narrative and he would start talking. 'Oh, this is a formation. This is the motion. Hey, coach, watch the lean on the left tight end. It's perfect.' That's awesome.

"It's interesting because there are some guys who have to just get on the grass and run it. But not Luke."

Kuechly said his preparation really took the next step when he went to Boston College. Even though there were classes, that's when football really became his job (after leaving school early, he got his degree in the spring of 2015, three years after he was drafted).

"You try to learn the playbook, but you don't really know how to learn a playbook when you're in college," he said. "And then you start to feel like you really understand that playbook. And then I got here, and I would sit on the phone with Warren Belin (his first linebackers coach in 2012), and I would sit at my house in my parents' house in Cincinnati, and we'd go through the playbook. And it takes me a while to learn stuff."

So Kuechly would pull out those notebooks, and he'd write down what the Panthers called it, and immediately next to it what they called it at BC. Throw a bunch of words at even the smartest rookie, and you can confuse them.

But if he's willing to write:

Toby Dollar - Type 4
Toby Dollar - Type 4
Toby Dollar - Type 4

over and over and over, he'd begin to get it.

"And then I'm like a big believer in if it works, keep doing it," Kuechly said. "And so that's how I was able to remember things: I would hear it, I would write it down, and then I'd have to read it, and oftentimes I would rewrite stuff.

"Like there's some stuff in these notebooks that I just looked up where I would rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite because if I can't conceptually see it in my mind, if I can think about it in my mind and I can build a formation and see what it looks like, and this is how we move into it and if I can't do that in my mind, then there's a there's a 0 percent chance that I'm going to get it right, like less like 0 percent."

The memory of that game plan that McDermott and Holcomb nearly had to abandon before he got it haunts him to this day.

When he talks about it, Kuechly closes his eyes and starts drawing it on an imaginary whiteboard. If you were standing on the other side of the window watching him, you'd think he was conducting an orchestra.

And actually, he is.

"I told McD and Al, give me one day and I'll figure it out," Kuechly said.

When Rivera tells the now-classic Christmas Eve story, the one about Kuechly watching film when the building was empty because his parents were a few hours away and he had nothing better to do, one of the parts that people sometimes miss is that he's not just watching film.

"I walk down the hall, and he's watching film," Rivera said. "And he looks at a play, and he says it out loud. And he looks at a play, and he says it out loud."

That's the rote repetition that's central to Kuechly's thought process.

"I have to write it," he said. "I have to write it, and I have to talk about it. So, I would talk, I would write it, and then I would talk until you're like, 'I got it.' Well, I don't have it. I've got to keep talking.

"Because the amount of information that we got in the NFL was way more than college, and I love information. There's probably more in the NFL because that's the only thing you have to do. I wake up at 6:30 a.m. and all I do from 6:30 till I leave the facility at 7, 7:30 p.m. is football.

"But the information is the best thing. What can you learn before the ball gets snapped that's going to help you so it makes sense?"

So after begging McDermott and Holcomb for a day, he went back to his linebackers room,  and he wrote it and said it to himself over and over.

"And then I'm like, 'All right, well, it makes sense now,'" Kuechly said. "If I can't conceptually think about it in my mind like there's a projector screen around here and I can see everything. If I can't see it here, then I can't do it. So if I can see it like right here (while tapping the notebook), then I can make it happen. And writing it and saying it over and over helps make it more concrete in my mind, like, 'All right, hey, it's covered.'

"Hey, this is a formation, we've got two guys, we got slot here, tight end, quarterbacks here, running back's offset to the left. Here's our pressure, slot pressure, boom, Captain Munnerlyn. Line movements here. Here's my run gap. This is where the safeties come in. And then when that formation comes out, 'Boom, I got it.'

"And if I can't do that, then it just won't happen, right?"

Kuechly's asked if he was still doing this five, six, seven years into his career.

"Oh hell, I would lay in bed at night before I would go to sleep, and I could see like the call sheet," he said. "And then I would go through stuff in my mind of like, all right, formation, this is our defensive play, here's the call, this is where I'm aligned, this is where TD is, our nickel's here, boom. Now, if it's motion, now we're here, and then say it's this run play, boom, I'm here to here. And then I'd do everything like base formations like Cover 3, Cover 4, Cover 1, Cover 2, and then I'd have all of our blitz packages, boom, boom.

"And I could run through it in like 15 minutes, and I could like see all of it, and it helped me. I just needed reps, and if I had reps I could get it, and that's one thing I did before I go to bed because I would understand."

Some people count sheep.

But for Luke Kuechly, he needed every rep, every whiteboard, and every notebook.

And then he'd drift off to sleep, and probably dream of the Uniball Signo 207 Micros that he forgot to order, the things he had to have so he could be ready for the next day.