This is your brain on football.

Chris Brown has a post up at Smart Football entitled “Football, decision making and the brain” that makes you wonder what goes through the heads of people who handle talent evaluation.  In his piece, he links to a New York Times article about the Mannings and the Wonderlic test that contains one of my favorite quotes of all time from Wonderlic himself:  ”Why in the world would you want to know how smart a football player is?”

And this also:

… Eli Manning’s score was so high that when I mentioned it to Charlie Wonderlic, he suggested I recheck my facts and said, ”There’s not a job on the planet that requires a person to score at that level.”

That’s the NFL for you.  It’s similar to this absurd fixation on 40-yard dash times.  How often does your average lineman run forty yards at a stretch in a game?  Personnel guys get lost in the trees of these idealized stats and lose sight of the forest of whether a kid is a good football player sometimes.

Of course, if you’re trying to figure out why your recruits are wearing their underwear on the outside, maybe you need to cling to those stats.  Any port in a storm…