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"My conscious brain is really bad at playing goalie": what Devin Cooley's viral riff says about choking

Devin Cooley says his "conscious brain" is bad at playing goalie. Research on choking and automatic skills explains why, and what athletes can practice.

By Victor YoonResearch reviewed: every source checked against the journalNov 2, 2026 6 min read X @
Devin Cooley in a Team USA jersey drops into his stance as a German forward's shot comes in, with the puck in front of his pads

What you'll learn

  • What Cooley said after the game, and the word he corrected two days later
  • Why skilled players often can't remember how they made a great play
  • The everyday task that shows how overthinking trips you up
  • The practice change that stopped golfers from choking in a classic study
  • Where a goalie's attention should go when the shot comes

Devin Cooley stopped 34 of 36 shots on Sunday, Oct. 18, as the Calgary Flames beat the Carolina Hurricanes, the reigning Stanley Cup champions, 3-2. It was his first win of the season. Then he sat down with Flames TV host Brendan Parker and spent about a minute explaining why he plays better when he isn't thinking.

Devin Cooley in his Calgary Flames gear, standing in front of the net
Calgary Flames goaltender Devin Cooley during a game against the Washington Capitals on March 9, 2026. This is not the Oct. 18 game against Carolina. Photo: The Kip, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

"When I start having too much fun, it makes me go from an unconscious goalie to a conscious goalie, and my conscious brain is really bad at playing goalie," he said. "So I have to let my unconscious brain do the work because it reacts a lot quicker." When he's thinking too much, he said, "I can't react in time, I'm slow, I'm behind the play."

He kept going in the dressing room. "If you ask me how I made a save, I have no idea," he said, as quoted by Inc. "Just my unconscious brain does it. And that's what you work in practice for."

Sportsnet posted the clip and it spread fast. Two days later Cooley told Sportsnet's Eric Francis that he'd turned his phone off because of all the notifications, and that he'd picked the wrong word. "I'm watching it back, and I'm like, 'No, dude, it's your subconscious brain.' Unconscious, I'd be passed out on the ice."

If you've watched your kid look great all week in practice and then tighten up in a big game, you've seen the flip side of what Cooley was describing. Sport psychologists have been studying it for decades, and his postgame riff lines up with that research pretty well.

What the research calls it

"Conscious brain" and "unconscious brain" are Cooley's shorthand, and researchers don't divide the brain that way. The terms they use are automaticity and explicit monitoring. Automaticity is what happens when a skill has been practiced so many times that it runs without step-by-step attention. Explicit monitoring is when you start watching and steering each piece of that skill on purpose, the way you did back when you were first learning it.

Explicit monitoring theories of choking say pressure pushes skilled athletes to pay close attention to mechanics they already own, and that attention gets in the way of the automatic version.

Think about it this way. You tie your shoes every morning without thinking about it. Try to explain each loop out loud while you're doing it, with someone watching, and your fingers start fumbling a knot you've tied thousands of times.

Devin Cooley in a Team USA jersey drops into his stance as a German forward's shot comes in, with the puck in front of his pads
Devin Cooley, playing for the United States, stops a shot from Germany's Dominik Kahun in a men's international game in Mannheim, Germany, May 10, 2026. Photo: Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

The golf study behind it

The best-known test of this idea is a 2001 paper by Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, built around golf putting.

Black and white photo of a golfer bent over a putt while a large crowd watches from behind a rope
A golfer putts in front of a large gallery, about 1920. Photo is for illustration and is not from the Beilock and Carr study. Photo: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (no known restrictions on publication).

First they compared novice and experienced golfers. The experienced players were worse at recalling the details of specific putts they had just taken, which the authors read as a sign that skilled putting is stored as a procedure that runs without step-by-step control. That's close to Cooley saying he doesn't know how he made a save.

Then they added pressure and tried different kinds of training. Choking showed up in putting, and it didn't show up in a mental arithmetic task that hadn't become automatic. Golfers who trained while doing a distracting second task still choked under pressure. Golfers who trained while being watched and filmed, so they got used to feeling evaluated, stopped choking.

Where your attention should go

In 2013 Gabriele Wulf of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas reviewed 15 years of research on attention and movement in the International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology. Across different tasks, skill levels and age groups, people performed and learned better when they focused on the effect of a movement, like where the ball or implement goes, than when they focused on their own body.

For a goalie, the effect is the puck. Thinking about your glove hand or your feet while the shot is coming is the kind of internal focus the review found works against you.

Devin Cooley in a Team USA jersey down in the butterfly position with the puck on the ice in front of him
Devin Cooley makes a save for the United States against Germany in Mannheim, May 10, 2026, with the puck at his feet. Photo: Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

What the research can and can't show

Putting is slow and self-paced, and the golfer decides when to start. A save is a split-second response to a shot someone else chose. So the golf results point in a direction for hockey, and they don't transfer one for one. The Wulf review pools many studies, which tells you about averages across people and tasks. It can't tell you what will happen to one player in one game.

Learning new technique, reading a scouting report and fixing a bad habit all still take deliberate attention. The research is about what happens when that attention lands on a skill that's already automatic, at the moment it has to be performed. And Cooley's account is one goalie describing one night. It matches the research, but it isn't evidence on its own.

What athletes can do with this

Devin Cooley in a Flames jersey crouched in his stance in front of the net during warmups
Devin Cooley during warmups before the Flames played the Seattle Kraken on October 4, 2026. Photo: XR228, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
  1. Practice with some pressure on. Beilock and Carr's golfers stopped choking after they got used to being watched and filmed. For a youth player that could be a coach filming a shooting drill, or a scrimmage where something is on the line.
  2. Keep attention on the puck. Coaches can phrase cues around the puck and where it's going ("follow it all the way in") rather than around body parts. That cue is our example, built on the review's findings.
  3. Build a reset routine. After a goal against, Cooley's self-talk was "It doesn't matter. The past is dead. There's nothing for you there." Off the ice he locked his phone with a blocking device so he could "reset the nervous system" before his next start. Neither study tested routines, but having one gets your attention off the last goal and back to the next shot.
  4. Sleep and eat real food. These studies didn't test either one. Still, the reps you put in at practice need a rested, fed brain to run on game day. Regular meals with protein, vegetables and fatty fish like salmon or sardines give your body the raw materials it uses every day.

The reps build the saves. We make STATE as daily brain nutrition, one 2 oz omega-3 shot, so the basics are covered and the brain is ready to run those reps when the game starts.

Sources

Brain Recovery
Between the hard days

Daily brain nutrition

One 2 oz shot with omega-3 and citicoline. NSF Certified for Sport.

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Observational findings are described as "associated with."

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