The Wonderlic intelligence test that has long been part of the NFL’s pre-draft screening process is mocked by many as irrelevant to a player’s football playing ability. But one group of researchers says the Wonderlic can be valuable in predicting how a player will fare off the field.
A paper published this month in the American Journal of Applied Psychology found that there’s a correlation between a player’s Wonderlic score and his likelihood of being arrested during his time in the NFL.
“The effects are relatively small,” author Brian Hoffman, a professor at Georgia, told ESPN. “But it’s important here because when making multimillion-dollar decisions, a small effect can be very meaningful. A player’s getting a four-game suspension can be a big deal, competitively and financially.”
The study also found that a player who was arrested before the draft is almost twice as likely to be arrested during his NFL career as a player who had not been arrested before the draft. That makes sense, and it’s no surprise that many teams will move a player down or off their draft boards if he’s arrested. But the Wonderlic result is more surprising, and suggests that teams may have legitimate reasons to continue using the much-derided test.
