Football and IQ

Players who want to enter the NFL draft need to take a modified IQ test called the Wonderlic that's scored on a 0-50 scale, with a 20 representing an IQ of about 100. Consequently, one can do things like assemble the graphic above which show the average IQ by position. "The closer you are to the ball, the higher your score" is one common way of familiarizing the results, though in fact the tackles on the offensive line seem to score higher than the guards. Long story short, being the quarterback demands intelligence and so does executing blocking schemes on offense.

Comments

I always chuckle when people use the term "skill position". As if keeping a 300 pound defensive lineman from getting your quarterback without holding, tripping, or chopping him involves no skill.

Posted by Notorious P.A.T. | July 19, 2008 1:44 PM

My high school football coach called us linemen the guys we do not trust with the ball.

Posted by spencer | July 19, 2008 1:44 PM

Are all defensive players equally brilliant/dense? I would have guessed the safeties and middle linebackers need to be smarter than the other defensive players.

Posted by danimal | July 19, 2008 2:21 PM

As a bonus, click on the marginalrevolution link ("the graphic above" link), scroll thru the comments and enjoy the stylized race-baiting of Steve Sailor.

Chris Ford commenting in 5 ... 4 ... 3 ...

Posted by Shine | July 19, 2008 2:28 PM

An alternative explanation would be that there is a perception by coaches that brighter players ought to play certain positions, and players get cast into those roles, regardless of whether it's actually helpful or not.

Posted by Serial Contrarian | July 19, 2008 2:29 PM

What danimal said. I would have expected at least middle linebackers to need high IQ's. My guess is that the test, which is timed but not to the split second, is more related to being able to learn something complicated than to being able to figure out what is going on instantly.

I don't see any easy way to measure split second thinking with a written test, but I think it could be done with a computerized test (will have to control for hands by having a sub-test where there is an arrow and you just have to hit the right key and contrast with things like the geometric/spatial parts of an IQ test with extreme time pressure.

Posted by Robert Waldmann | July 19, 2008 2:31 PM

I would have expected at least middle linebackers to need high IQ's.

The chart seems to come from the table in this Wikipedia entry (woo sound data collection), which is sourced to a book by Paul Zimmerman -- in any case, the table don't distinguish middle linebacker from outside linebacker (or left from right tackle, or free from strong safety). So if there's any effect there, it's washed out. Though when these tests are given to college seniors, it may not be determined what kind of linebacker they're going to be.

Anyway, five-yard penalty on the "visualizing information" guy for labeling FS and SS differently when the information being visualized don't discriminate between them.

Posted by Matt Weiner | July 19, 2008 2:44 PM

"the average NFL player scores a little above average."

So, the average NFL player scores at a little over a 100 IQ. Congrats.

Is this supposed to be impressive?

Posted by brenna | July 19, 2008 2:47 PM

Tackle is a more demanding position than guard. Scouts now consider left tackle a "skill position".

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | July 19, 2008 2:54 PM

Doesn't this sort of thing demonstrate the folly of trying to regard "intelligence" as one narrowly defined characteristic?

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2008 3:08 PM

"The closer you are to the ball, the higher your [IQ] score"

The reason for this is that the closer you start out to the ball at the time of the center snap, the more crowded the field is around you. So, close to the ball, the more important upper body strength is and the less important footspeed is. (If you are the center, say, there just isn't much room to run and you don't have anywhere to go in particular.)

Upper body strength is relatively equally distributed between the races, but footspeed most definitely is not. So, tailbacks, wide receivers, and defensive players have a need for speed, so they are disproportionately black. I haven't checked recently, but in most recent years since Jason Sehorn's retirement, none of the 64 NFL starting cornerbacks at the start of the season were white, and none of the 32 starting tailbacks were white. (For some reason, this never gets as much publicity as the perceived lack of black quarterbacks.)

As we all know, there is about a 15 point difference IQ gap between whites and blacks, so positions that are black dominated tend to have lower average IQs than positions that are more integrated (or that are white monopolized, such as placekicker and punter).

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 19, 2008 3:23 PM

Paul D. Zimmerman, Sports Illustrated's renowned gridiron guru, reported the following average Wonderlic scores for certain positions among top college players invited by the NFL to the annual scouting combine. (I've converted them to IQ scores by taking the average Wonderlic IQ test score of 21 = 100 and counting each answer above or below 21 as two points):

Offensive tackles: 110
Centers: 108
Quarterbacks: 106
Guards: 104
Tight Ends: 102
Safeties: 96
Middle linebackers: 96
Cornerbacks: 94
Wide receivers: 92
Fullbacks: 92
Halfbacks (tailbacks): 90

Don't worry about small difference between positions. This is based on a limited sample size and each year the scores vary a little. I've seen other Wonderlic averages by position, and they are always a little different, but the basic pattern remains.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 19, 2008 3:29 PM

What this all means is that IQ isn't terribly important in the NFL. It's not completely unimportant, or they wouldn't bother mandating that draft prospects take the Wonderlic test, but it hardly compares to factors like, say, the ratio of weight divided by 40-yard-dash time. America has 150 million people with 3 digit IQs, but the number of people who weigh over 200 pounds and can run the 40 in 4.4 seconds is very limited.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 19, 2008 3:35 PM

As much as Sailer is a big old racist, isn't he right about this? For whatever reason, on average black people don't score as well on intelligence tests as white people. So it would make sense that the average intelligence test scores of mostly black positions would be lower than ones where there's lots of white people, like quarterback and offensive line.

Posted by John | July 19, 2008 3:36 PM

IQ is racist.

Posted by razib | July 19, 2008 3:36 PM

OK Matt and commenters : How many of you clicked the link *and* were mature and secure enough to not take the test (I haven't ... yet but my resistance is weakening). Rest of you anyone volunteering scores ? Their arn't anny speling qweschuns are there ? if they're r I'm not taking it.

I had a thought on the offensive linemen fact. IQ tests really measure academic achievement as well as intelligence (there is no way to avoid this). Thus they measure studiousness as well as intelligence. Thus they measure deference to authority as well as intelligence. An offensive lineman with an attitude is roughly a contradiction in terms as is a sensible non reckless tailback (if your so sensible why are you getting tackled by people twice your weight play after play).

My guess is that offensive linebackers study more than corner backs and that the daring of the tailback always on the edge of a career ending knee injury also leads to tailbacks risking losing their elegibility for academic reasons.

That is I say they are nerds not brains (wouldn't say that to their faces as I am not a reckless tailback type plus I couldn't outrun an NFL offensive lineman (with one leg in a cast even)).

Posted by Robert Waldmann | July 19, 2008 3:52 PM

Speaking of footspeed, it will be interesting to see if one of the most extraordinary streaks in sports is finally snapped at the 2008 Olympics. The men's 100 meter dash, the race to be the Fastest Man on Earth, is among the most widely competed events on earth -- every boy at some point tries to outrun his classmates. The Olympics usually invite a little under 100 top sprinters from around the world, and then winnow them down through three rounds of qualifying to get to the eight finalists.

For the last six Olympics, beginning with 1984, all eight finalists in each men's 100m dash, have been of West African descent. That's 48 out of 48!

Similarly, human beings have run 100m in under 10.00 seconds 357 times. All but once, it was done by men of West African descent. The lone exception was Patrick Murray of Australia, who is half-Irish and half-Australian Aborigine.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 19, 2008 3:58 PM

I was only surprised by one thing here: that tackles are a little smarter than centers. I'd have picked the center to be the smartest guy on the team. I guess it's because it's a brutal and under-rewarded position. If you're really smart, you probably wouldn't want to do it. But, then again, it still pays a lot more than engineering. Maybe us engineers are really the stupid ones.

Posted by fostert | July 19, 2008 3:59 PM

Dear fostert:

Don't worry too much over minor differences among offensive line positions. I've seen other samples of Wonderlic data where the average scores by position are slightly different, although the general pattern remains.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 19, 2008 4:13 PM

As we all know, without factoring Steve Sailor in the mix the IQ gap would be more on the order of 20-25 points :)

Posted by David B. | July 19, 2008 4:14 PM

Another (also oversimplified, but useful) way to think about it is like this: talents are arrayed in a pyramid, with only a few people at the top.

Imagine you have a whole bunch of guys who are 6-5 and 280 pounds. You then sort them by 40 yard dash times. The handful of extremely fast ones at the top of the pyramid of footspeed are assigned to play defensive end because they have the best chance of sacking the quarterback. The pretty fast ones in the next layer down play defensive tackle because they might sack the QB.

That leaves a lot of not very fast guys to play offensive line. At any level of footspeed in the lower part of the pyramid, there are more people than at the top of the pyramid. So, to differentiate among the average speed guys, you start looking more at other skills. One of those is IQ, which is useful in learning the playbook, in learning to play other similar positions in the offensive line, in keeping out of jail, in not getting caught taking steroids, and so forth.

So, because there are more people physically able to play offensive line, there is more selection pressure on non-physical attributes, such as IQ.

That then allows coaches to devise more cognitively difficult tactics for offensive linemen to execute than for defensive linemen, which in turn reinforces the need for IQ among offensive linemen. (Or perhaps causality runs more in the opposite direction -- it's kind of a chicken or egg problem. But the important thing to keep in mind is that IQ is a minor factor in the NFL relative to mass times acceleration.)

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 19, 2008 4:22 PM

By the way, the much talked-about Congressman Heath Shuler scored a 90 on his Wonderlic test:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/07/presidential-timber.html

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 19, 2008 4:38 PM

By the way, the much talked-about Congressman Heath Shuler scored a 90 on his Wonderlic test

90 out of 50?

That's a taserin'.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 19, 2008 5:01 PM

Much more likely explanation:

Though we think of football positions as distinct skills, specialization begins relatively late in football, with players frequently playing multiple positions in high school, and switching positions in college. The problem is, a lot of coaches making the calls on who plays which position are racist, are more likely to put poorly educated, low-income blacks at tailback and wide receiver than at quarterback, which is more likely to go to well-educated white dude from a wealthier background, EVEN if their actual skills are equal.

One reason I expect you see a higher average on the offensive line is that there's no such racial selection present there, the position (especially at the tackles) isn't as flexible, and specialization begins relatively early. Hence you see both a greater racial balance at the tackle position and a higher overall IQ.

This makes a lot more sense than making an erroneous correlation between IQ and performance at quarterback. History is littered with quarterbacks who had stellar scores on the Wonderlic, only to become really lousy NFL players. Joey Harrington and Alex Smith are two examples of phenomenally smart guys who are terrible. Ben Roethlisberger is an idiot who is a very solid NFL quarterback. Playing the position IS very dependent on mental skills, it's jsut that those skills have more to do with quick decision making and concentration than on higher cognitive processing.

So in conclusion: the variance in IQs at the pro football level is the fault of racist college football coaches NOT inherent differences in the difficulty of playing the positions.

Posted by Michael T Sweeney | July 19, 2008 5:24 PM

Oh, and one more point made by an above commenter: If more compliacted positions really demanded players with higher IQs, centers would score higher than OTs, since I've been told it's a much more intellectually demanding position.

Posted by Michael T Sweeney | July 19, 2008 5:28 PM

Years ago (35 or so) psychological profiles of different positions was done. These results on the Wonderlic look like they were mainly caused by self-selection based on the profiles we studied in psych class. Offensive linemen tend to be more stable and self-sacrificing for the good of the team while DB's are thrill seekers, etc. Test taking ability would be greater among certain profiles than others, also.

Posted by Th | July 19, 2008 6:00 PM

Matt's take on this is almost certainly wrong. It's not that the offensive line demands higher intelligence. The key fact you have to keep in mind here is that for each position in the NFL, you're dealing with the 30 most-qualified people in the country, league-wide. The question isn't properly, "What IQ is needed to do this?" it's "What skills are needed, and is IQ a luxury the selection process can afford to take into account.

Steve Sailer above seems to have it about right, as far as I can tell. If you want to be a wide receiver in the NFL, you must be tall, strong, lithe, blazingly fast, and have the skills of catching a football and running with it etc. To add to that skill set a high IQ would effectively disqualify most of the WRs who are performing at a perfectly high level as it is. So IQ is not a disqualifier. To be an offensive lineman you have to be very large and pretty nimble -- this skill set is common enough that the NFL has the luxury of seeking out intelligent players in that role.

The baseball analogy would be catcher. In its bluntest form, we could even say that since you do not have to be an outstanding athlete to be an offensive lineman or a catcher, that's where the nerds end up, because then you can make the big leagues by effort, diligence, and (of course) some skill.

Posted by Martin | July 19, 2008 6:10 PM

Speaking of baseball, you can see the impact of integration of the game in 1947 on third basemen.

Before Jackie Robinson, there were few powerhitting third basemen. After him, there were many. I suspect that without integration, many of the modern powerhitting white third basemen would have been right fielders.

One of the things that happened was that strong-armed blacks with better footspeed moved into right field (e.g., Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, Roberto Clemente), which shoved a lot of white guys with good arms, quick reflexes, and power but no speed to third base.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 19, 2008 6:22 PM

Here's a table of quarterbacks' scores on the Wonderlic. (21 equals 100 IQ, with two IQ points per correct answer more or less):

http://www.macmirabile.com/Wonderlic/Wonderlic.htm

My guess is that IQ is most useful in, say, a second or third string QB whose job is carry a clipboard around and function as a quasi-assistant coach, and be ready in case of injury to step in and not screw up too badly -- a physically limited Brian Griese-type (IQ = 136).

I wonder if the Air Force has tests of "real time situational awareness" for fighter pilots that would be more useful than a classic IQ test in picking out quarterbacks with the right mental skills. After all, IQ is, in substantial measure, a test of your ability to focus mentally, and that's not exactly what you want in a QB. You don't want him locking on to one receiver, because the free safety will see it and make the interception. You want him to multitask. (I, as an example of an obsessive thinker who isn't particularly quick in real time, but can go deeper into a subject than most people, utterly lacked the cognitive ability to play QB in a 6 on 6 flag football game. I had the arm to be an effective QB in a 2 on 2 touch football game, but the more receivers I had to monitor, the more overloaded my brain got.)

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 19, 2008 6:35 PM

Michael T. Sweeny's idea above that lots and lots of racist white coaches are losing games because they are racistly assigning blacks to score all the touchdowns at tailback and wide receiver, while whites get all the really good jobs like offensive lineman and blocking back sounds like a parody, but he's actually just expressing the logical implications of the conventional wisdom.

Political correctness makes you stupid.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 19, 2008 6:41 PM

The more interesting question is whether racial stereotypes are keeping a few whites out of certain positions. After all, while the media has run a vociferous campaign for many years to increase the proportion of black quarterbacks to well over their proportion in the population (a campaign which Rush Limbaugh lost his job as an NFL commentator for questioning a few years ago), the press almost never ever mentions that at three positions: tailback, left cornerback and right cornerback, the NFL is usually 0 for 96 white, except when injuries let some white benchwarmer into the game.

Zero out of 96 -- that's pretty incredible. Wouldn't three or four whites out of 96 be more plausible-sounding? Are the biological differences between the races so vast that 0 out of 96 is the natural number? Isn't it more likely that there would be a few whites at these positions if the press would do its job and occasionally criticize coaches for succumbing to racial stereotypes about whites not being athletic enough to be tailbacks or cornerbacks?

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 19, 2008 6:58 PM

"the average NFL player scores a little above average."

Well, I'd be surprised if guys who get to the very pinnacle of football in this country, the NFL, were a bunch of blithering idiots (that is, much below 100 I.Q.). They say that according to the U.S. Army's tests, better combat soldiers- the ones who survive combat and win the medals- have higher I.Q.s. One can think of a lot of ways that intelligence could help a person become an outstanding football player, whether it's learning better tactics and strategy (regardless of whether they're following a coach's orders, the types of things individual football players do require some know-how that would make a player better if he really understood what it was he was doing), making better lifestyle choices, or learning how to train better on his own.

But despite all this, maybe most of the difference between an outstanding football player who gets to the NFL and one who doesn't really is just physical, and the product of genetics, not training.

Posted by Swan | July 19, 2008 7:06 PM

The stereotype of top football players being dumb stems largely from the football factory colleges typically being state flagship universities with quite high freshmen average SAT scores in the 1100 to 1300 out of 1600 range. So the average student at Florida or Michigan or Notre Dame is one or two standard deviations above the average football player in IQ, but the average pro prospect is only a little below the national average in intelligence.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 19, 2008 7:12 PM

(I, as an example of an obsessive thinker who isn't particularly quick in real time, but can go deeper into a subject than most people, utterly lacked the cognitive ability to play QB in a 6 on 6 flag football game. I had the arm to be an effective QB in a 2 on 2 touch football game, but the more receivers I had to monitor, the more overloaded my brain got.)

Mental tasks really are like physical tasks in that different types can just require getting accustomed to and training.

Smart people commonly think that they're "not that type" of genius when they attempt some intellectual endeavor, and can't get it right on the first try. But in reality, a Michaelangelo usually is what he is because something about art attracted him psychologically enough that he kept working on it (depsite any beginner's initial unease) and he figured it out. Those people who get frustrated because they can't do a mental task without some practice or training, or who assume that since they're smart, their rashly-composed opinions on a variety of subject always have to be good conclusions, are people who don't understand how to use their brains yet. They may be severely underestimating their ultimate potential for performing tasks they prematurely gave up on.

Posted by Swan | July 19, 2008 7:15 PM

Isn't it more likely that there would be a few whites at these positions if the press would do its job and occasionally criticize coaches for succumbing to racial stereotypes about whites not being athletic enough to be tailbacks or cornerbacks?

Taking all of your premises as true, this reminds me of something I've thought about NBA players. I'm not really a basketball fan, but from my limited experiences playing basketball, seeing basketball played and seeing NBA games, it's dawned on me that the top white players often seem to be able to compensate for limited athletic talent by playing a smarter game (white Jason Williams, Steve Nash). So I thought that if a white person wants to succeed in that, what he should do is try to use his smarts to play a more intellectual game (for example, try to use his body and his athleticism in a creative way, instead of allowing himself to settle into ruts of how he's going to move himself around the court). But if he doesn't have the smarts to do that, he just doesn't have it, and if he doesn't have the physical gifts either (height and whatnot), he's just out of luck.

The stereotype of top football players being dumb

Well, there's dumb and then there's dumb and then there's dumb. There's less than 100 I.Q. dumb, and there's less than blogosphere contributor dumb, and there's the dumbness of working on an endeavor that you don't know how to work on (for example, some person who is very smart but doesn't have any ideas or knowhow about infantry combat gets sent to a battlefield). So when it's said about a certain person or group of people sometimes it's a prejudice against them and sometimes it's just a description (albeit often a description that's a generalization).

Posted by Swan | July 19, 2008 7:29 PM

and there's less than blogosphere contributor dumb,

Should have been something like "dumb-as-compared-to-a-contributor-to-the-left-blogosphere dumb."

Posted by Swan | July 19, 2008 7:34 PM

One question is what happened to all the really tall white American basketball players? There are a lot of perfectly good really tall white European or South American players in the NBA, but very few white Americans.

I'm guessing that white American parents are trying to point their tall sons away from basketball and toward other positions in other sports that reward height like soccer goalie, baseball pitcher, and football quarterback.

By the way, despite all the denunciations of Rush Limbaugh in 2003 for questioning the media's long-standing push for more black quarterbacks in the NFL, black QBs haven't done particularly well over the last three years. There seem to be a lot of talented tall white QBs. Perhaps some of them would have been basketball players in an earlier generation, but white Americans have largely ceded basketball to blacks, so they are concentrating their tall talent on other venues.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 19, 2008 7:38 PM

So what about baseball? I'm guessing that most players aren't as smart as football players. But pitchers and catchers are probably pretty smart. Catchers are probably consistently smart, while pitchers vary widely. Some can just throw some serious heat, and some, like Greg Maddox, can psych out a batter. I don't know, but I'm guessing Maddox is really smart. Mariano Rivera probably isn't. But who really knows?

Posted by fostert | July 19, 2008 9:00 PM

Speaking of quarterbacks and the difference between IQ and football problem-solving, three-time Pro Bowler Frank Ryan quarterbacked the Cleveland Browns to the NFL title in 1964, then picked up his Ph.D. in mathematics from my old school, Rice U., five months later. His thesis was entitled "Characterization of the Set of Asymptotic Values of a Function Holomorphic in the Unit Disc," and it began: "As is well known, a Blaschke product f(z) in (z-x 1) has radical limits f(e) of modulus one almost everywhere on (z=1)."

Interestingly, Ryan was not particularly intelligent at playing football. He'd been a second stringer at Rice and a third-stringer with the Rams before new Browns coach Blanton Collier figured out how to simplify the game for him. Terry Pluto wrote in Browns Town 1964:

"Frank wasn't a great football mind," said Bill Glass, who was Ryan's roommate. "But Frank didn't have to be brilliant on the football field. [Coach] Blanton Collier was brilliant. Frank was an intelligent guy off the field who was gutsy and a gambler on the field." ...

"Frank came to the Browns with this reputation as a brilliant guy, the math genius, and all of that," recalled Bernie Parrish. "He was not brilliant in terms of his play-calling. But Frank Ryan was the guttiest quarterback that I've ever seen. He'd stand in that pocket and damn near let those linemen kill him before he threw the ball-he held on to the ball until the last possible second waiting for Gary Collins to finish his post pattern." ...

"Blanton had a lot of theories about every position, and they usually were pretty simple," Ryan said. "What he did for me was to break throwing the football down into small parts and technique. It gave me some rationale to base my performance upon."

"Collier cut down the Browns' passing playbook, and then told Ryan, here are the primary receivers on each play, and here is the man to look to next, and so on.

"Blanton figured it out for Frank," Art Modell recalled. "If there was a blitz, he'd tell Frank, ‘Just throw the ball to the tight end, or throw it to Ernie Green.' I remember standing next to Blanton when Frank was throwing the ball on the sidelines; he'd quietly tell Frank, ‘Pick out a target. It's like shooting a rifle, just zero in on the chest.' Over and over, he told Ryan that: ‘Zero in on the chest, hit the man between the numbers.' He had tremendous faith in Frank." ...

"Collier believed that just because Ryan was becoming a doctor of math, it didn't mean he was a genius on the football field. Collier was a former high school algebra teacher, and knew there was little connection between football and math. In math, you're presented with a problem and you have plenty of quiet time to find an answer. You can take one road, erase it, then try another. You think things through.

"Not in football. Not with a 250-pound lineman bearing down on you, and with variables changing every second as assignments were carried out or missed, or your receiver fell down, or your foot stuck in the mud, or a running back forgot the play. With the Rams, Ryan [had] became so obsessed with all these details and potential problems that he nearly paralyzed himself...

"[Ryan] also said, "The ideal quarterback must have serendipity. Why does he make the consistent good play? By training? By accident? By coincidence? Or some sixth sense? The times when I felt the best on the football field-the championship game for instance-my mind was following no logical conscious thinking pattern. There was no effort to analyze, to evaluate, to review, to study the patterns and tendencies of the defense. Something just came to me like a flash and it worked-not just once or twice, but almost every time."

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 19, 2008 11:06 PM

The idea that offensive linemen have higher IQs because coaches can afford to discriminate for intelligence doesn't really hold up because it's logical conclusion would be that defensive linemen would be similarly intelligent, which they aren't.

Posted by Travis | July 20, 2008 12:52 AM

Political correctness makes you stupid.

Probably there is a mix of racism / prejudice (a.k.a. arbitrary decision-making and misjudgment) and selection based on know-how that comes from experience looking at and selecting players that explains how different players get picked. Also there is a bit of showbiz to it-- hick teams (places like Arkansas, the Dakotas, and South Carolina) want more white guys in star and starter positions, and Notre Dame tries to put a guy with an Irish surname (or at least a Catholic) in a star position (like quarterback).

But really, what Steve Sailer is saying makes a lot of sense-- the objective realities have to make a big impression on a coach, because he can't help seeing his players perform again and again in try-outs, practice and games, and of course he knows what talents they need to succeed in a given position. It would take a lot of selective-vision for a coach to not be heavily influenced by these factors. Racism and classism probably explain some specific trends (or the extent of them) but a single talent occurring much more frequently in one ethnic group than in another has to have more general influence than that of racism/classism in our modern society, where racism is not as prominent anymore as it could be.

Posted by Swan | July 20, 2008 1:11 AM

No, speed is more important to defensive linemen than to offensive linemen because fast defensive linemen can get to the quarterback in time to sack him, which is hugely valuable. Men who are huge and fast are rarer than men who are simply huge, so teams will put up with less brains in a huge fast defensive lineman than in a huge but not fast offensive lineman.

More generally speaking -- this example shows how contemporary intellectual discourse is hamstrung by the taboo on writing about "selectionism." We're supposed to act in public like we believe that we can social engineer away every problem, yet in private we all act as if what really matters is selection -- which, pretty much, is true.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 20, 2008 1:16 AM

"Frank wasn't a great football mind," said Bill Glass, who was Ryan's roommate. "But Frank didn't have to be brilliant on the football field. [Coach] Blanton Collier was brilliant. Frank was an intelligent guy off the field who was gutsy and a gambler on the field." ...

This sounds just like what I was talking about in an earlier comment-- smart people who know they can do something like what Ryan was able to do off the field expect what seem like simpler tasks to come naturally to them. When they screw up, they come up with a scapegoat and pretend people who actually succeed at the task don't know what they're doing and succeed through luck. But what they miss out on understanding is that different mental tasks are different in what they require from the person analyzing them, and even a gifted mind approaching a problem that is novel to it can hit some bumps by not understanding the nature of the problem before attempting solutions in practice.

"Blanton had a lot of theories about every position, and they usually were pretty simple," Ryan said. "What he did for me was to break throwing the football down into small parts and technique. It gave me some rationale to base my performance upon."

It's vexing, the smart people I've met who are convinced they can do everything. Smart minds have a tendency to impose complexity on things even when it isn't there (for purposes of the task to be acheived). This is why a person like Ryan could fail at something like figuring out football and could require as much time thinking about football to really learn what it's all about as he does working on his math problems. If you haven't figured out things like this- "how your mind works" or "how to use your mind"- you like a kind of intelligence that in certain contexts is really crucial.

Posted by Swan | July 20, 2008 1:20 AM

and even a gifted mind approaching a problem that is novel to it can hit some bumps by not understanding the nature of the problem before attempting solutions in practice.

Or I should say, "a type of problem that is novel to it."

Posted by Swan | July 20, 2008 1:28 AM

In baseball, anti-black discrimination held back the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals, the two teams that took the longest to hire black players, in the 1950s. In contrast, the leaders in ending discrimination -- the Brooklyn Dodgers, Cleveland Indians, New York Giants, Boston-Milwaukee Braves and so forth prospered. (The Yankees were the main exception to this propensity.)

But, in competitive markets people figure out sooner or later that irrational discrimination is costly -- by the mid-1960s both the Cardinals and Red Sox won pennants with teams with black stars.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 20, 2008 2:16 AM

Steve Sailer writes: "No, speed is more important to defensive linemen than to offensive linemen because fast defensive linemen can get to the quarterback in time to sack him, which is hugely valuable. Men who are huge and fast are rarer than men who are simply huge, so teams will put up with less brains in a huge fast defensive lineman than in a huge but not fast offensive lineman."

In reality defensive linemen who are sack specialists aren't all that huge. They tend to be in the 260 pound range. If you were interested in facts you could look it up, Stevie.

But offensive linemen under 300 pounds are a real rarity in the NFL, because the running game requires that sort of size.

I don't think anyone should hold his breath waiting for arch-scientist Sailer to grab a consulting job with an NFL team.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | July 20, 2008 2:41 AM

from my limited experiences playing basketball, seeing basketball played and seeing NBA games, it's dawned on me that the top white players often seem to be able to compensate for limited athletic talent by playing a smarter game (white Jason Williams, Steve Nash).

(white) Jason Williams is smart? Steve Nash is not athletic? Jesus, you really do have limited experience with basketball.

There are numerous smart black NBA players, in fact it's difficult to have a long career in the NBA without a decent understanding of the game. Lots of dumb white ones too. Commentary on the NBA is more racist than any other sport I can think of.

Those people who get frustrated because they can't do a mental task without some practice or training....are people who don't understand how to use their brains yet. They may be severely underestimating their ultimate potential for performing tasks they prematurely gave up on.

One of many reasons why "innate intelligence" is such a poorly defined and vague concept, and why trying to measure it with a scholastic pen-and-paper test given after years of schooling doesn't tell you much.

Posted by MQ | July 20, 2008 2:56 AM

It's very easy for an offensive lineman to put on pounds to reach any desired weight. There's no shortage of men willing to eat more in order to play in the NFL.

In contrast, it's very hard to get faster. That's why the words "sprinting" and "steroids" go together -- sprinters max out their natural speed and turn to drugs for help.

Men who are heavy and fast are rarities and the NFL will put up with lower IQs in them than in men who are just heavy.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 20, 2008 6:23 AM

" ... but white Americans have largely ceded basketball to blacks ..."

"Whites"?

Posted by Comment | July 20, 2008 7:35 AM

Interestingly, offensive tackles are actually the second highest-paid players in football. They also tend to be the biggest, and surprisingly among the fastest guys on the field. They are freaks of nature. That they also appear to have some the highest IQs doesn't really surprise me either, although it's unclear to me just how much IQ has to do with football ability. It probably helps a little, but it's not like the NFL is full of geniuses or anything.

Posted by ed | July 20, 2008 11:06 AM

by playing a smarter game (white Jason Williams, Steve Nash).

You don't seem to know much about the NBA. Jason Williams's nickname is (or was)"White Chocolate." I leave it to you to work out why. FWIW, in my lifetime, the player who best understood basketball was probably Magic Johnson.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 20, 2008 2:43 PM

Is the Wonderlic score a one-time thing?

Your Team's Top Draft Pick has been timed in the 40 a hundred times between HS and training camp, but the one Wonderlic he takes sticks with him?

Also, to accurately measure football intelligence, Wonderlic tests should be given in game conditions, ideally after a concussion:

"How many fingers am I holding up, and which title doesn't belong: Romeo and Juliet, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors?"

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