NFL PROCESS OF FINDING TALENT GETTING INTENSE… AND PERSONAL

Seattle: GM John Schneider and Pete Carroll using crystal ball and tarot cards to find draft talent.

NFL owners around the league are becoming increasingly comprehensive in their selection process concerning which athletes remain on their boards and whether or not they are worthy of higher draft selection positions.  The Wonderlic exam and 15 minute player interviews during the scouting combine are examples of just how much investors want to know about their product before they spend the billions of dollars they do to put together a roster of players that hopefully will bring them a playoff team and ultimately a Super Bowl contender.

This year, a new exam called the "Player Assessment Tool" or (PAT) is being introduced at the scouting combine in Indianapolis that will hopefully offer a broader determination on whether or not a particular player is suited for the professional game and the life of an NFL football player on and off the field.  Where the Wonderlic exam focused on the general IQ of a player, the new test will focus on other aspects of a player that the owners and coaching staff deem important regarding the character and reliability of a player to perform on the practice field, the film room, the lecture process and on the football field during gametime.  This PAT focuses more on; reliability, coachability, adaptability, gamesmanship, coping skills, passion, motivation, mental toughness and learning style success percentage .  Some players learn better on the practice field during drills etc. , while other players learn from chalkboard diagrams and film analysis.  Still specific to some players, they learn simply from playbook material and individual teaching tools given each player to help them prepare for future team and player opponents.  The new exam also analyzes players ability to choose appropriate behavior and how to avoid the pitfalls that often present themselves after players become professionals, offering more money, more privilege, more opportunity, but at the same time a lot more idle time that didn't exist since  perhaps before kindergarten, and definitely not during college or high school when they had the added challenge of academic curriculum to cope with as well.  All of these evaluation tools are designed to provide a clearer image of what exactly each player can bring to their respective football teams if they decide to choose each particular prospect in the NFL draft.  The investment commitment is quite substantial for franchise owners and investors, but it also aids the football players as well, offering information that may cause a program to choose specific player types to fit into a system that may be more suited for them to succeed, or may actually contribute to a drop off of player performance due to incompatibility with that system.

Where the Wonderlic exam included 12 minutes to answer as many questions as possible of the 50 multiple-choice questions offered and calculates each athlete's ability to answer the questions quickly, the new Player Assessment Tool is an exam allowing players 60 minutes to answer the questions, evaluating a completely different skill set unrelated to on-the-fly decisions necessary to be made on the playing field.  The number of questions on the PAT haven't been released, but it has been announced that the results of each player's test will not be released and unlike the Wonderlic, there are no test scores per se, only subjective evaluations made by each of the teams assessing the results of the tool. While many coaches and general managers consider the Wonderlic particularly useful in evaluating quarterbacks and offensive linemen, positions that are believed to demand the greatest intellect because of the need to decipher complex defenses, the hope is that the Player Assessment Tool, will give teams clearer insight into a broader range of players.

“I knew players who didn't score well on the Wonderlic but had great instincts,” said Ernie Accorsi, a former Giants general manager, who was consulted during the creation of the new test. “I had a player once, this guy played in a good league in college, but the psychological testing indicated he didn't handle pressure well. You know what? He didn't, as it turned out. The Wonderlic can’t tell you that.”

This new NFL Player Assessment Tool was created by Harold Goldstein, a professor of industrial and organizational psychology at Baruch College in New York.  He devised the test with Cyrus Mehri, a lawyer in Washington DC who chairs the Fritz Pollard alliance, which monitors the NFL's minority hiring practices along with the Rooney family who created the Rooney rule requiring NFL franchise general managers to interview at least one minority when going through the hiring practice for head coaches.  The creators of this test asked a group of general managers what qualities and attributes they wanted in potential prospects at the combine.  

They developed 16 aspects thought to be predictors of NFL players success, including learning agility and conscientiousness.  The test is very much like an exam given to firefighters because they, like football players, must be able to assess situations quickly and decide how to proceed while under extreme stress.

Recently, through the fog of rumor and controversy surrounding Notre Dame linebacker Manti T'eo, coaches and general managers and other player assessment officials have danced around the sensitive subject of sexual orientation with potential draftees at the various NFL scouting combines at various colleges around the nation as well as the largest combine at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana.  Because of civil rights and political correctness, it has been a slippery slope to discuss personal aspects of selected prospects lives, especially sexual orientation topics. However, there seem to have been many gray areas utilized to enable team assessment representatives to determine exactly the mental preparedness that a player must have to function inside the various locker rooms of the NFL. National and local media journalists will certainly ask questions about the more hotly debated subjects with each particular player and Manti T'eo has been the poster boy for this complicated phase of player interviews at each of these combines and pro-days leading up to the NFL draft.  The question remains; Should player personnel officials be legally allowed to question the sexual orientation of NFL prospects, even if the question is not asked outright in specific words, is it fair (to the players) to ask personal questions that don't seem directly related to playing the game of football?  On the other hand, what makes football different from many of the other industries using similar evaluation processes, in terms of finding employment throughout the business world, is that not all employees share a locker room with those of a different sexual orientation than their own.  Still, this is a complicated subject that will likely not be resolved anytime soon.  Several players at the recent Indianapolis scouting combine reported being asked questions that related to sexual orientation without actually asking the question "are you gay?"  Questions like; "Do you date girls?"  Or "Do you have any children?"  Or "Are you married or have you been married to a woman?"  Players reported feeling uncomfortable about some of the personal questions asked at the combine which has now blown into a full-fledged controversy and it all surrounds the Notre Dame linebacker T'eo whether or not he's connected to any of it or not.  All of this, was of course, brought on by the controversy after he was the victim of a prank where a person to which he is acquainted created a nonexistent woman who was allegedly dying of a form of leukemia.  Through conversations on the telephone and text messages and e-mails, he had a long-distance romantic affair with her though he never met her personally.  What made the situation become more infamous was that the linebacker used the story to motivate him and quickly the story became a national phenomenon.  Then, through a leak somewhere within this complicated story, it was discovered that there was no woman and was no imminent death from cancer and the whole thing had been concocted by a friend of T'eo as a prank that went too far.  After this information hit the media, it took off like a blazing wildfire and at the center of the flames was Manti T'eo.  

The question was Now; "Did the Notre Dame football star know about the hoax and more specifically, When was he aware that there was no cancer, no imminent death from leukemia or even a woman at all? Ultimately, there was no way that Manti T'eo was going to avoid the questions that the media would certainly ask and even more importantly, how is he going to answer the questions posed to him by NFL team officials at the scouting combine or his Notre Dame pro day?  T'eo agreed to go on a nationally televised program hosted by Katie Couric where he was asked several very poignant questions including; "Why did you ever make an attempt to see this dying woman whom you reportedly cared for romantically?"  "When did you know about the hoax?"  And "Why didn't you come clean about this prank played on you immediately when you knew that it indeed was a prank?"  And perhaps the most commonly asked question; "Are you gay?" T'eo's answer is to all of these questions were convoluted and unclear, except for the last question.  Couric asked him frankly, "Are you gay?"  And his answer was, "No, far from it."

Now, comes the complicated process of deciding just exactly what Manti T'eo's value is in the upcoming NFL draft in April, and if his draft status changes, will it be because of his subpar performance at the Indianapolis scouting combine, or will it be because of the hypersensitivity of openly gay athletes in professional sports?  Many players have expressed on the record and off just exactly how uncomfortable they would be having a gay teammate in the locker room or on the field. Recently, 49ers cornerback Chris Culliver expressed that gays were not welcome by him to play in the NFL, a statement that he later recanted and apologized for online through Twitter messages.  However, many believe he is just a microcosm of what NFL players really feel about having gays in the locker room or on the football field with them, openly gay. 
There are several issues facing the NFL and college athletics alike.  Times are changing in America, albeit very slowly in some instances.  There have been a handful of former professional athletes who have come out and become open about their sexual orientation, but so far there haven't been any active players with the fortitude it takes to crack through the biases related with athletics in America.  I'm sure that will change someday, but like the military for so many years, it's done ask don't tell for the most part… Until it becomes more common, player evaluation officials are going to have to skirt around the issue with sensitive, quite delicate questions that are already under scrutiny by players and civil liberty activists protesting what they believe to be an obvious barrier and discrimination.

It is both good news and bad news for players to anticipate the evaluation process during these interviews and tests processes during scouting combines and pro days.  On one hand, it gives each player an opportunity to show something to perspective coaches and owners that everything that makes a football player doesn't always happen during tangible skill assessments like; 40 yard dashes, L-jumps, V- jumps, benchpress and the agility exercises in field drills.  After all, some of the more dismal showings at the Indianapolis scouting combine belongs to QB Tom Brady who needed to be timed in the 40 with the sundial, Dan Marino who may have needed to be timed with the calendar and several other players who were unable to impress during the combine drills but went on to become great, even legendary football players.  The Wonderlic Exam and the Player Assessment Tool are designed to test players for non-tangible strengths or weaknesses, not to evaluate a player to become a football talent.

Now, with the scouting combine completed, it's time to look to the many "Pro Days" for each of the college prospects invited to these events.  Several players who have officially declared for the NFL draft have decided not to participate at any of the scouting combines, some by choice and some haven't been cleared physically to participate.  QB Matt Barkley USC, OLB Jarvis Jones Florida, RB Eddie Lacy Alabama among many other players not participating could hurt their draft stock but not necessarily.  Players already projected to go high in the first round may be concerned that a poor showing may lower them in the eyes of potential franchises.  On the other hand, those prospects graded poorly for one reason or another look to the combines and pro days to redeem themselves and show their speed, agility and strength.  Other players feel that they deserve better analysis and feel that the combine events can help hoist their trade stock.  Interested enough, whether or not most franchise general managers and coaches admit it, they do utilize the results of the Wonderlic and Player Assessment Tool to determine certain characteristics that make a player valuable or not valuable.

In closing: 

Regardless of what tests are used to determine player value, there will always be the intangibles of players that cannot be measured through on-field drills, speed, endurance or agility exercises.  Nor can various tests showing; intellect, drive, motivation, passion or assessment skills determine the infallibility of predicting how good a football player will be once he is drafted and called on to make plays on a football field.  These are only slightly sophisticated measuring tools designed to help form an educated guess (or hypotheses) on the viability of each individual player to succeed at the next level, the National Football League.  There are still going to be busts and players who are passed over in the draft, yet become superstars and even Hall of Fame players. So far, the Player Assessment Tool has been added to the long time Wonderlic exam,

Regardless of what benchmarks are created to determine specific player value, there will always be the player who possesses so many positive intangibles that GM's and coaches throughout the league must put aside the traditional measurement tools used to determine whether or not an athlete has what it takes to succeed at the highest level in America's most popular and most followed sport.  Nor can various tests showing intellect, drive, motivation, passion or assessment skills predict infallibility of players and how successful a player will be once he steps on to a professional football field.  Prospects invited to the NFL combine are measured for traditional values like; height, weight, arm length, and hand size.  Those are only guidelines that give a talented football player better chances at meeting an assumed potential based on those tangible statistics, not a predetermined guaranteed that a player will be successful or unsuccessful.