How smart do successful football players need to be?
Posted on Feb 2, 2010 by Paul Schempp
With the Super Bowl ahead for Sunday, much of America’s attention is focused on football. A discussion of football, on any level, seldom lasts long without some reference to a player’s intelligence. Most athletes, and football players in particular, are often accused of playing with less than a full load in the brains department. But a study recently published in the journal Human Performance, tested this theory and the findings are as interesting as they are insightful. The study attempted to determine the efficiency and equity of general mental ability in a nontraditional employment setting—professional football. The National Football League (NFL) uses a measure of general mental ability, the Wonderlic Personnel Test, to evaluate potential draftees in an assessment-style environment. A total of 762 NFL players, represented from three draft classes, were included in the study’s sample. The results indicated that general mental ability was unrelated to (a) future NFL performance, (b) selection decisions during the NFL Draft, and © the number of games started in the NFL. In other words, general mental ability appears to play no role in one’s success in professional football.
Source: Lyons, B., et al. (2009). Not much more than g? An examination of the impact of intelligence on NFL performance. Human Performance, 22, 225-245.
Tagged: football players, nfl, success, mental ability, expertise, developing expertise