It was entertaining to read the historical record on scores on the National Football League’s Wonderlic test, a ten-minute test of intelligence.  The amount of time allocated as well as the correlation of scores to football performance should indicate how seriously the NFL takes this test.  And it should cause us to reflect on the validity of most timed tests of intelligence.

Peyton Manning, acknowledged as one of the smartest football players in the history of the game, scored 28, a very average score. The highest score, a perfect 50, was recorded by Pat McInally, a punter for the Cincinnati Bengals.

As one of the highest score[r]s ever, let alone out of all tight ends, Benjamin Watson has cemented himself in the record books as being one of the “smartest” tight ends in the NFL. Even Watson has admitted that the test means very little, stating that some teams place a lot of emphasis on it while others hardly any. Either way, Watson scored an almost perfect score and he has had a nice little NFL career since being drafted in 2004. He is currently a member of the New Orleans Saints and was a member of the New England Patriots Super Bowl Championship team in 2005.

Watson scored a 48 on the test, but the Patriots did not covet him enough to prevent him from signing with another team.  In retrospect he might have proved a more stable choice than Aaron Hernandez or Rob Gronkowski, but it would have had little to do with his intelligence.

The lowest score reported here belonged to Frank Gore, running back for the San Francisco 49ers. Gore showed a poor aptitude for the Wonderlic, scoring a 6, but what NFL team would not want Gore in their backfield?  And running back is not a position without intellectual requirements, but clearly not the kind of intellect that the Wonderlic requires. Gore knows when to bounce outside toward the open field and when to drive into the center of the line.

It is very interesting how NFL teams regard the whole Combine testing program. Everyone is interested enough to attend the workouts, but no one makes final decisions based on performances under artificial conditions. Teams are more interested in game tapes, interviews and coach recommendations. The New England Patriots have recruited a steady stream of college athletes from Rutgers who otherwise went unnoticed, because the Rutgers program recruited and developed the kind of football players they liked.  And most of these recruits are still with the Patriots, a team that went to the AFC Championship game this year.

What if the academic world held the same opinion of timed-testing and looked for deeper qualities in their students than quick-and-dirty answers?  The enterprise of education would twist around 180 degrees.  Imagine if we watched students on video-tape in classrooms and interviewed their teachers and examined artifacts they produced over extended periods of time? Imagine if we looked at their SAT or ACT scores and then said, “What else you got, kid?”  What if we evaluated qualities like perseverance, imagination and collaboration, realizing how much these mattered to academic success?

Then we would run our schools like the NFL, one of the most intensive and comprehensive evaluators of talent in the history of personnel recruitment.