For his 1984 classic The New Thinking Mans Guide to Pro Football, Sports Illustrated writer Paul Dr. Z Zimmerman did get one anonymous staffer to spill some then-current averages. Offensive tackles led the way at 26, then came centers (25), quarterbacks (24), offensive guards (23), tight ends (22), safeties and middle linebackers (21), defensive linemen and outside linebackers (19), cornerbacks (18), wide receivers and fullbacks (17), and halfbacks (16). And what about place kickers and punters? Who cares? the source said.
On its own, a solid Wonderlic score means little. Like a 40-yard dash time, it provides one tiny, standardized data point to employers who presumably take a holistic approach to hiring. But because teams have decades of data on file, they can compare the Wonderlic scores of current college players entering the draft to those of past prospects. They simply use it to find the extremes, Foster said. A very low score or a very high score, he added, could lead teams to conduct more testing or look into the prospect more closely.
The most famous extreme occurred in 1975, when Harvard receiver and punter Pat McInally reportedly scored a perfect 50 on the Wonderlic. The Cincinnati Bengals picked him in the fifth round of that years draft, but not before his reputed intelligence reportedly scared some teams away. In 2011, McInally told the Los Angeles Times that Young informed him that acing the Wonderlic may have cost you a few rounds in the draft because we dont like extremes. We dont want them too dumb and we sure as hell dont want them too smart.
.F. Wonderlic acknowledged that the single best predictor of job performance was previous work experience. But as Charles Wonderlic put it: How do you predict someones performance if they have never done that job before? The second-best predictor of job performance, E.F. Wonderlic reasoned, was cognitive ability.
What he found was that different jobs had different cognitive demands ranging from very low to very high, said Charles Wonderlic, E.F.s grandson. And there were really distinct IQs around each job. And the further away you got from that distribution, thats when you started to experience problems.