Thursday, September 01, 2011

A word on Terrelle Pryor and the Wonderlic

First of all we need to establish the fact that I believe Terrelle Pryor will be a terrible quarterback in the NFL. This post is not about that. I'm not trying to support him.

Basically Pryor took the wonderlic test, just like all incoming players, and apparently scored a 7. Which basically means that as far as the testers are concerned, Pryor is illiterate. That score has since been revised to 21, apparently after a re-take.

Now just for fun I though "hey, you know what, I'm always bitching about the NFL scouts and their retarded tests, lets have a crack at this wonderlic thing". I'm now even more convinced that every scout in the NFL should be fired with immediate effect. The cause? Absolute stupidity.

Now I scored a 20, which is about average apparently. Part of the reason for this is because I ran out of time with a few questions still unanswered. But a big part of it was due to the maths questions. Maths isn't really my strong point.

But if there is one thing I can tell you having taken the test, it's that none of it, not a single damn question, has any recognisable application to the football field. None.

Football is not a maths test, nor is it a language test. A reasonable degree of English comprehension is obviously required, but that doesn't seem to be what Wonderlic is testing. The questions are about as far removed from anything that a player would encounter on or off a football as you could possibly imagine.

Who gives a fuck what number 70 is 35% of?
Who gives a shit if a rocket takes off carrying 10,000 pounds of fuel and travels for 15 minutes, yadda, yadda?

Anyone, anyone, in their right mind who thinks this test will communicate anything of value to them about a football player needs to be taken as far away from the football business as money and modes of transportation will allow.

All that test told me is that my ability to do calculations in my head sucks. But then I already knew that. And that's probably the biggest beef I have with the test. One deficiency like that and you're screwed, because about one third of the questions seem to be maths related.

Now if I was recruiting accountants or NASA scientists or engineers, then I could see the point. Then it would make sense to me. But football players? As I see it right now I think people (read scouts and the press) are just using this as a reason to lay unnecessary shit on Pryors doorstep or to cover their butts about being non-committal with their evaluations ("Well, I did warn you about his wonderlic score..." etc).

I think Pryor will suck in the NFL. I didn't need a ridiculous wonderlic test to tell me that. It just blows my mind that people get paid big money for crap like that. Ah well, back to the coffee...

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