Greatest Show on Turf can’t have just anybody

At the conclusion of each college football season, hundreds of players with ambitions to play… At the conclusion of each college football season, hundreds of players with ambitions to play in the NFL undergo intense physical training in order to impress scouts at tryouts and the NFL combined. Yet, how many of them understand that their brain power could be the difference between being drafted in the first or third rounds, or by even making a team at all?

Each year, potential NFL players are herded into a classroom, handed pencils and asked to take a 12-minute standardized test with 50 questions designed to measure cognitive ability. The exam, The Wonderlic Personnel Test, has been given to millions of job seekers worldwide in dozens of fields since 1937. Its function is to measure how well people comprehend problems and how quickly they can solve them.

Since players have just 12 minutes to take it, or about 15 seconds per problem, most don’t finish. Nonetheless, the average NFL prospect scores about the same as the average applicant for any other job, a 21. A 20 indicates the test-taker has an IQ of 100, which is average. Below are sample Wonderlic questions:

(1)When rope is selling at $0.10 a foot, how many feet can you buy for 60 cents?

(2) RESENT; RESERVE: Do these words: 1) have similar meetings 2) have contradictory meanings 3) have neither the same nor opposite.

The exam was introduced to the NFL by Bengals owner Paul Brown in late ’60s, but was first used by Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys. Since then, all teams have utilized the exam in various forms, though some have wondered the exam’s relevance. I, for one, believe that there are certain positions, notably the quarterback, where intelligence should be taken into account, but otherwise, there is just no substitute for God-given talent.

Yet, years of testing shows that by correctly answering a question about the price of peaches, for example, a player is more likely to wind up in the starting lineup for any position. With the exception of quarterback, intelligence has not traditionally been considered a prerequisite for football success. But the NFL has grown to the point that coaches now focus on exploiting the other teams’ weakest links by creating mismatches rather than stockpiling superior athletes.

However, while it’s nice to have a player with intelligence, there are plenty of successful teams and individual players out there without much in the way of brain power. Take the Steelers’ Ike Taylor.

This season, Ike beat out Ricardo Colclough, Bryant McFadden and Willie Williams to start at left cornerback for the team. But Taylor owns one of the lowest scores in the history of the NFL on the Wonderlic exam, well below the scores of his three competitors. In the end though, he plays while the others warm the bench.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal collected test results, published reports and verified their findings with agents and teams to calculate the average scores for each team. Their results were published a little more than one month ago, with the St. Louis Rams winning the title as the NFL’s smartest team.

“We’ve made a religion of it in the last few years,” Rams coach Mike Martz said in the Wall Street Journal. “So long as he plays at a high level, we’ll always choose a guy that is smarter.”

It is essential that Martz has intelligent players because of the complexity of his offensive system. To make the “Greatest Show on Turf” click, linemen have to master multiple protection packages, and some receivers have to learn four positions. In fact, the Martz system is so complex the Rams don’t even have a playbook.

“It’s like algebra – once you learn the equation, you can solve the problems” Martz said.

That’s why when it comes to the draft, the Rams staff pays special attention to a player’s Wonderlic results, and it shows. Currently, the team has a Harvard grad as a backup QB, a free safety from Stanford and a wide receiver (Kevin Curtis) who happens to have the highest Wonderlic score among active players, a 48.

“You need to ‘get it’ quick,” Buccaneers general manager Bruce Allen said in the Wall Street Journal. “We don’t have a lot of patience in the NFL right now.”

Although it may be overrated, there must be something to the “intelligence factor” considering the four smartest franchises, St. Louis, Oakland, Tennessee and Tampa Bay (in that order), have each played in a Super Bowl in the past five seasons.

To be fair, the Wonderlic exam is just one of many methods teams use to measure cognition, and is generally not considered to be the most influential. There is some debate whether the exam should be administered at all. Some people detest it, saying it’s culturally biased and inaccurate. The exam has also been called unfair because some players hire tutors to help them prepare, and because in some cases, it has knocked potential high draft picks down a few rounds, costing the players millions.

While intelligence may be important, it is ridiculous for me to believe a player could fall into the third or fourth rounds of the NFL draft because of a low Wonderlic score. Can an exam like that measure a player’s heart, drive to win or leadership abilities? Of course not, and until then, the exam should only make a difference in the rare situation when all other factors between players are equal.

Joe Balestrino is a senior staff writer for The Pitt News. E-mail him at balest@pitt.edu.