Why the Wonderlic test is an outdated method of thinking about NFL intelligence

As the Director of the Center for Evaluation at Harvard Medical School for 14 years, it was my job to determine the best ways of assessing whether our students would make good doctors. When thinking about the combine and the NFL draft, I cannot help but see many parallels between the challenges faced by medical schools and pro sports teams in figuring out who will be a star and who will fall by the wayside. All of the students at Harvard have grades that go through the roof, just as the combine invitees have extraordinary athletic skills. But do they also have those other factors that will help them become the next great surgeon? Do they have that other something that makes them more likely to become the next Peyton Manning rather than the next Ryan Leaf?

What has struck me in observing both talent pools is that regardless of how well they did in school, no matter what their IQ is, some candidates are really smart in ways that are unrelated to grades and tests. These “smart” people become stars in their respective fields. Others just don’t have the sense that makes them successful practitioners of their art, whether on the football field or in the doctor’s office. It has been my job to understand what to measure, how to measure it, and how to provide a metric by which we can compare one person to another. In medicine, this is an art and science that has made significant strides, but is far from perfect. In football, the gap between data that is meaningful and useful and data that is readily available is deep and wide.

This week in Indianapolis, 330 prospects are being poked, prodded, observed and measured in almost every way possible at the NFL scouting combine. NFL talent evaluators will ponder the implications of every slow 40-yard dash time. They will wonder about the ability of a smallish defensive back to outlift a couple of the big-name defensive linemen. And they may have to try to figure out what to make of an otherwise hot quarterback’s score of 17 on the Wonderlic Test.

The Wonderlic has become the NFL’s standardized IQ test, a measure that proposes to determine how smart a football player is. In the 1970s, legendary Cowboys coach Tom Landry began administering an aptitude test developed by the psychologist Eldon F. Wonderlic that had been used in other industries for decades to make hiring decisions about clerks and managers. Based on Landry’s recommendation, the test was adopted by the NFL and administered to every player at the combine. The Wonderlic contains 50 items to be completed in just 12 minutes, and offers test-takers the kinds of mental challenges high school kids hate facing on college entrance tests. The questions range from math problems (What’s the next number in the following sequence…) to vocabulary questions (Are the words “respectable” and “responsible” similar, different, or unrelated?).

The concept makes…