Jonah Lehrer writes about how bad NFL teams are at drafting talented players, particularly at the quarterback position.

Despite this advantage, however, sports teams are impressively amateurish when it comes to the science of human capital. Time and time again, they place huge bets on the wrong players. What makes these mistakes even more surprising is that teams have a big incentive to pick the right players, since a good QB (or pitcher or point guard) is often the difference between a middling team and a contender. (Not to mention, the player contracts are worth tens of millions of dollars.) In the ESPN article, I focus on quarterbacks, since the position is a perfect example of how teams make player selection errors when they focus on the wrong metrics of performance. And the reason teams do that is because they misunderstand the human mind.

He talks about a test that is given to college quarterbacks eligible for the NFL draft to test their ability to make good decisions on the field.  Evidently this test is considered important by NFL scouts and indeed scores on this test are good predictors of whether and when a QB will be selected in the draft.

However,

Consider a recent study by economists David Berri and Rob Simmons. While they found that Wonderlic scores play a large role in determining when QBs are selected in the draft — the only equally important variables are height and the 40-yard dash — the metric proved all but useless in predicting performance. The only correlation the researchers could find suggested that higher Wonderlic scores actually led to slightly worse QB performance, at least during rookie years. In other words, intelligence (or, rather, measured intelligence), which has long been viewed as a prerequisite for playing QB, would seem to be a disadvantage for some guys. Although it’s true that signal-callers must grapple with staggering amounts of complexity, they don’t make sense of questions on an intelligence test the same way they make sense of the football field. The Wonderlic measures a specific kind of thought process, but the best QBs can’t think like that in the pocket. There isn’t time.

I have not read the Berri-Simmons paper but inferences like this raise alarm bells.  For comparison, consider the following observation. Among NBA basketball players, height is a poor predictor of whether a player will be an All-Star.  Therefore, height does not matter for success in basketball.

The problem is that, both in the case of IQ tests for QBs and height for NBA players, we are measuring performance conditional on being good enough to compete with the very best. We don’t have the data to compare the QBs who are drafted to the QBs who are not and how their IQ factors into the difference in performance.

The observable characteristic (IQ scores, height) is just one of many important characteristics, some of which are not quantifiable in data. Given that the player is selected into the elite, if his observable score is low we can infer that his unobservable scores must be very high to compensate. But if we omit those intangibles in the analysis, it will look like people with low scores are about as good as people with high scores and we would mistakenly conclude that they don’t matter.

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