The ball is snapped. The quarterback drops back, immediately surrounded by a chorus of grunts and groans, the sounds of linemen colliding. The play has just begun, but the pocket is already collapsing around him. He must focus his eyes downfield on his receivers and know where they're going while also reading the defense. Is that cornerback blitzing or dropping back? When will the safety leave the middle? The QB has fewer than three seconds to make sense of this mess. If he hesitates, even for a split second, he'll get sacked.
No other team sport is so dependent on the judgment of a single player, which is why NFL scouts and coaches take the decision-making skills of quarterbacks very seriously. Since the early 1970s, when Cowboys coach Tom Landry began using the Wonderlic intelligence test to evaluate potential Dallas players, the league has included it at the annual scouting combine, to assess every player entering the draft. Basically a short version of an IQ test, the Wonderlic is 12 minutes long and consists of 50 questions, which get progressively harder. The underlying assumption is that players with high scores (read: smarter) will make better decisions in the pocket. If a quarterback can solve pre-algebra problems quickly, then he'll be more likely to find his man while getting blitzed.
At first, this seems like a logical assumption. Just think of all the cognitive skills required to become a successful QB. He needs to memorize hundreds of offensive plays and dozens of defensive formations. He has to study game tape. And, in many instances, quarterbacks are responsible for changing the play at the line of scrimmage. This helps explain why NFL teams start to get nervous whenever the Wonderlic scores of a QB in the draft fall below 24, the unofficial average for the position. (In comparison, the average score for computer programmers is 29 while janitors score 15, a point below running backs.) Scouts believe a quarterback who isn't smart, at least by this measure, won't be able to handle the mental rigors of the game.
There's only one problem with this way of thinking: It's completely wrong. Many of the most successful quarterbacks in NFL history reportedly had subpar Wonderlic results. Donovan McNabb scored a 14 and Brett Favre a 22, while Randall Cunningham, Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw each scored 15. What's more, several QBs who had unusually high marks -- guys like Alex Smith and Matt Leinart, who scored 40 and 35, and were top-10 picks in their respective drafts -- have struggled in the NFL, largely because they make poor decisions on the field. "People obsess over the stuff they can measure," says former NFL quarterback and current ESPN analyst Tim Hasselbeck(Wonderlic score: 23). "We spend all this time talking about Wonderlic scores and results from the combine, but those numbers miss most of what's going on."
Consider a recent study by economists David Berri and Rob Simmons. While they found that Wonderlic scores play a large role in determining when QBs are selected in the draft -- the only equally important variables are height and the 40-yard dash -- the metric proved all but useless in predicting performance. The only correlation the researchers could find suggested that higher Wonderlic scores actually led to slightly worse QB performance, at least during rookie years. In other words, intelligence (or, rather, measured intelligence), which has long been viewed as a prerequisite for playing QB, would seem to be a disadvantage for some guys. Although it's true that signal-callers must grapple with staggering amounts of complexity, they don't make sense of questions on an intelligence test the same way they make sense of the football field. The Wonderlic measures a specific kind of thought process, but the best QBs can't think like that in the pocket. There isn't time.
