(670 The Score) Back in early April, former NFL quarterback Mark Sanchez made an interesting revelation on the Pat McAfee Show. Sanchez explained that Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields aced an aptitude test that was administered by Dr. Scott Goldman, who runs the Athletic Intelligence Measure and who consults with professional teams.
On Thursday, Goldman joined the Parkins & Spiegel Show on 670 The Score. Goldman's company has administered aptitude tests to around 2,500 NFL players in the past decade or so, including around 125 quarterbacks, he said. He has seen some correlation between the test results and on-field performance, though not quite enough to be statistically significant yet, he said.
Athletic Intelligence Measure grades an individual's intelligence, which Goldman was clear in defining – "If you're trying to think like what 2 + 2 equals and you know the answer is 4, that's smarts. That's knowledge. Intelligence
is how you go about solving that equation."
Under his company's guidelines and for ethical reasons, Goldman declined to go into specifics about any individual's test results. That included for Fields, but Goldman did confirm that Sanchez was "accurate" in sharing the Fields story on the Pat McAfee Show. The Bears selected Fields at No. 11 overall in the NFL Draft last Thursday.
"Justin did do something exceptional on our test," Goldman said.
Bears fans, get your Justin Fields jersey on Fanatics.
And then Goldman made a really interesting point in talking generally about what a perfect score means in any portion or sub-category of the test.
"The one thing that I think, just to clarify about the point Mark was trying to make is – and this happens in intelligence testing in general, there's a ceiling," Goldman said. "So for example, let's say I ask you five items. If you get all five of them right, that means we did not capture your true ability because you are actually better than the five items we tested. In fact, we probably should've test you seven items or 10 items or 15. So when a player hits a ceiling, what you say is we did not capture your true ability. Your true ability is actually better than what you represented. And so I think what Mark was trying to talk about and I just think it's an important point to clarify, very rarely – less than 1% of the time – an athlete gets a perfect score on one of our sub-tests that says he's even better than what we were able to capture. And some of those categories are very important, for say, a quarterback."
Goldman shared his belief that an athletic profile of a player consists of four buckets. It revolves around the physical aspect (size, strength, speed), experience ("You'll always feel pretty good about grabbing a linebacker from Alabama," Goldman said), intelligence ("the ability to acquire, process and apply information," he explained) and personality ("character, work ethic, are they going to be a good dude in the locker room?" Goldman said).
The 6-foot-3, speedy Fields appears to have the physical profile, and his track record of success at Ohio State suggests he fills the experience bucket as much as one can at his age. Now the aptitude test also now checks out, according to Goldman and Athletic Intelligence Measure.
Listen to the full interview below.
