Just as we know the sun will come up in the morning in the east, we know one future NFL player will score miserably on his Wonderlic test at the NFL Scouting Combine and the media and fans will be in a tizzy over it for days. It never fails. It is as sure a bet as anything when it comes to the combine, but we just don’t know which player will bear the unfortunate brunt of the negative headlines as the argument over the importance the Wonderlic test has on evaluating players truly holds.
It seems the only time you hear anything about the Wonderlic test is when the combine comes around. Perhaps that speaks more to the attention given to the NFL headlines, but it can be argued the time has come to evolve in a direction away from relying on the Wonderlic test as a barometer of a player’s intelligence and aptitude when it comes to the NFL. This debate will continue this week, and it already has. Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk went on record last year with his opinion no rookie should take the test. With the NFL scouting combine just days away, Florio once again is sticking to his guns on this argument.
The reason some feel the test should be abandoned is because the test results are supposed to be kept private. Of course, this being the sports world in which we live, nothing ever remains private for too long, especially for some of the star players when that score is low. Somebody’s poor score is going to get leaked. It is guaranteed to happen. Teams often do it to dissuade other teams in the draft from taking a player in the draft that they have their eye on to select later in the draft. It’s sketchy, very sketchy, and to some degree it’s amazing that various publications participate by publishing this negative and supposedly private info all for the sake of helping a front office scare off other interested teams. For that reason alone, Florio said a year ago, no player should take the test on the off chance it is their name attached to future headlines about low Wonderlic scores.
Regardless, the NFL continues to fail every year the one-question test regarding its ability to secure the results of the Wonderlic test.
For that reason, prospects should simply refuse to take the test. And here’s the script next year’s Scouting Combine attendees should use: “Sorry, sir. I choose not to take the test. You’ve told me that the results are private and confidential, but every year the scores for one or more players are leaked to the media. So the only way to reliably secure my own test result is to not create one.”
The NFL is currently working with National Football Scouting Inc. to determine the best way to scout players, which could lead to some eventual changes in the combine. But will that mean the possible demise of the Wonderlic test? At this point it is either too early to tell or not an option.
“Our first focus is to look at what we do currently and making sure that that’s relevant,” National Scouting Inc. president Jeff Foster told USA TODAY Sports. “And if it is, great, we’ll continue to do it, because historical comparison is really important to the evaluation process. But if we believe that there’s something that’s not relevant, then what can we replace it with that will help us evaluate the players?”
Well, at least one person seems to think the Wonderlic test may not be a great assessment to be used by the NFL. That would be Kathy Kolbe, the daughter of Eldon Wonderlic, the creator of the Wonderlc test. She told CBS Sports last year “I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the NFL uses it, I just don’t think it’s particularly wise.”
Here’s the thing. The Wonderlic test may or may not be a good judge of a person’s intellect or how they process and dissect and breakdown information. There could be some good to come out of the testing. But as the game continues to advance, one might think NFL teams will be more interested in knowing how well players break down what they are seeing on the field, how they handle clock management, whether they can count timeouts and determine the right time to go for two points and when they should take a knee, throw the ball away or run out of bounds. Unless that can be determined from a Wonderlic test, maybe there is no use to having the test anymore in the NFL.
[Pro Football Talk, USA Today]
