What the Wonderlic Got Wrong About Measuring Performance

The 50-question, 12-minute cognitive test became a familiar part of the evaluation process, giving teams a standardized way to compare prospects beyond their physical abilities. Wonderlic scores were widely discussed in draft coverage, especially when a prospect scored on the high or low end of the spectrum.

Then, in 2022, the Wonderlic disappeared from the NFL Scouting Combine. As part of broader changes to the evaluation process, teams began exploring other ways to assess cognitive skills. That shift showed that the problem wasn’t evaluation itself, but whether the metric being used actually measured what teams needed to know. While the Wonderlic assessed general cognitive ability, newer assessments such as S2 focused on skills more closely connected to processing information and making decisions on the field.

Why the Wonderlic Fell Short

The Wonderlic was a general test made to measure general cognitive ability, for example, how quickly someone could work through math, vocabulary, and reasoning problems. For an NFL team, it could provide some useful information, but it was not specific enough for the purpose. Knowing how a prospect performs on a general cognitive test isn’t the same as knowing how well that player will process information, make decisions, learn a playbook, or react to changing situations on the field. In theory, the Wonderlic gave NFL teams something they couldn’t get from observing a player, while offering an efficient, standardized way to assess cognitive ability. After all, football does uniquely involve a lot of information processing.

But as questions grew about how useful the Wonderlic was for predicting performance, research continued to find little evidence that it would strongly predict how well players would perform in the league. Oakland Raiders kicker Sebastian Janikowski famously scored 9 out of 50—despite owning several NFL and Raiders records.

There were other concerns as well. Critics questioned whether a standardized test was an appropriate way to assess something as context-dependent as football intelligence, while the public reporting of low scores sometimes treated the test as a measure of a player’s intelligence. NBC Sports stopped reporting Wonderlic scores for that exact reason. Existing football-specific ways to investigate similar questions also already existed, whether they involved studying game film or conducting football-specific interviews and tests. Given all this, the NFL removed the Wonderlic and sought an evaluation criterion that was closer to the questions teams needed to answer.

What Are You Actually Trying to Measure?

The Wonderlic isn’t inherently flawed or useless, but it wasn’t helping the NFL decide whether an already well-filtered group of elite athletes would succeed on the field. If we broaden our perspective, we can see that distinction matters in other decisions. For instance, the same principle applies when you’re reviewing what you should consider before using a betting platform. Users should prioritize clear licensing, transparent terms, and reliable payments over surface-level marketing.

The point is that one type of signal isn’t always better than another. The more important fact is that the criteria you choose should reflect what you actually need to know. If the idea is to assess whether a service is safe, fair, and reliable, those are the qualities the evaluation criteria should help establish. The NFL’s approach to prospect evaluation has placed greater emphasis on relevance, combining newer cognitive assessments with position-specific drills, medical evaluations, and on-field testing. Each provides a unique piece of information that helps teams better predict how a prospect will perform in the league.

Rather than choosing metrics first, it’s always best to start with the question you need to answer and select the criteria that can best answer it. For the NFL specifically, tests should help a team make a better decision about a player’s potential. That means the metrics should have some connection to outcomes the team cares about, such as positional effectiveness, scheme fit, and durability.

Building an Evaluation Checklist That Matches Your Goal

The lessons learned from the Wonderlic can be turned into a basic evaluation framework, starting first with the outcome, then working backward to the criteria that can help assess it. It’s a methodology that prevents convenient or familiar metrics from becoming stand-ins for qualities they don’t actually measure.

1. Define an outcome: Decide what you’re trying to determine. Is it a platform’s long-term value? Is it a person’s ability to succeed at the next level? Make sure you have a concrete idea of what this is.

2. Choose criteria that connect to it: Once you have a clear goal, identify the information that can meaningfully inform that decision.

3. Forget about irrelevant metrics: Numbers aren’t necessarily useful because they’re easy to compare or standardized. If a metric has a lack of connection to the outcome, giving it more weight because it’s readily available can create false confidence.

4. Look at multiple signals: Complex decisions require multiple sources of information to build a complete picture. A quarterback might have excellent accuracy statistics, but those numbers mean more when considered alongside how quickly he processes pressure and how consistently he makes good reads.

5. Reassess when the evidence changes: Evaluation systems shouldn’t be made permanent just because they’ve been used for years. If evidence shows that a particular metric isn’t helping predict the outcome it was tasked to measure, there’s good reason to reconsider its weight.

Outside football, that can mean looking past the easiest comparison points during an assessment. Even if a sportsbook platform has an attractive offer, it may tell you little about how reliably it handles payments or what protections it provides when something goes wrong. These details might be less attractive, but they give you a better basis for judging the experience you can realistically expect.

Better Evaluation Starts With Better Questions

When the NFL Combine stopped administering the Wonderlic, it wasn’t about the league rejecting the value of cognitive evaluation. In fact, the combination of football’s cognitive demands with physical and situational demands is distinctive in sports. It marked the recognition that a familiar metric isn’t necessarily a useful one when it doesn’t answer important questions. Ultimately, the NFL needed more reliable and up-to-date indicators of draft value and how a player would perform on the football field. Only then could the league justify a test’s place as a standard Combine measure. Even today, cognitive tests, like the S2, are done outside the official Combine testing process and are not a universal requirement for prospects.

Good evaluation begins by knowing what you want to predict, understand, or protect, and then choosing criteria that reflect that goal. In football, this has meant moving away from a standardized cognitive score and continuing to develop a broader approach to evaluating prospects. After decades of experience, the NFL has a strong understanding of the qualities that can make a successful player. The league will likely continue experimenting with how it measures the non-physical side of professional football, looking to quantify what traditional testing can’t capture.