Morris Claiborne Blew Off the Wonderlic Test

Back at the beginning of April, we got the awful annual ritual of a player's very low Wonderlic score getting released followed by idiots crushing that player as stupid and wondering how he ever passed a class. It happened to be LSU's Morris Claiborne, and I wrote a fairly detailed piece on why his rumored score of 4 on the test didn't matter.

Part of that post was a list of reasonable explanations beyond "LOL he's illiterate" why Claiborne might have scored in the single digits. As it turns out, I could have stopped after the first one, which was that he just blew off the test:

"They say it's an IQ test. I came to the combine for football. I looked at the test, and wasn't any questions about football. I didn't see no point in the test. I'm not in school anymore. I didn't complete it. I only finished 15 or 18 questions."

As far as I'm concerned, that's not an example of a player being dumb. That's a player being smart. The Wonderlic test is meaningless in the context of the NFL Draft, as there is no correlation whatsoever between performance on the test and success on the field. Furthermore, the test is designed to be taken once and only once without any prep ahead of time. Any player who prepares or takes it multiple times, which is many of them, renders his result on the Combine edition of the test entirely invalid.

Whether he knew that background about the test I don't know, but he ended up at the right conclusion. The test is worthless as far as the NFL goes. It didn't end up hurting him either, because he was taken sixth overall last night. I hope more and more players take the same attitude until they quit giving the test altogether.