The Intelligence of Football Players
If you read Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side, you know he offered his reasoning that argued that football players are the smartest in sports because the game is complex, dynamic and moves very quickly during an actual play. (Yes, The Blind Side book lead to The Blind Side movie, starring Sandra Bullock.)
Recently, in the New Yorker, Nicholas Dawidoff takes another look at football players’ intelligence:
The Redskins’ London Fletcher is undersized and thirty-eight years old, but he’s been able to play for so long because he is a defensive Peyton Manning: seeing the game so lucidly, yelling out the offensive play about to unfold, changing alignments before the snap, organizing the field in real time. Similarly, Lavonte David, who has been with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for two years, is just two hundred and thirty-four pounds—ten to fifteen pounds lighter than most at his position—the Wonderlic scores out on the Internet for him are not especially high, and, like all players, he makes the occasional boneheaded play. But he possesses dedicated study habits and a football clairvoyance that, come Sunday, finds him ignoring the blocking flow only at the one moment during a game when the offense runs the ball away from it.
The Hall of Fame Minnesota Vikings defensive lineman Alan Page weighed two hundred and forty-five pounds, the dimension of a modern fullback. Even so, Page was terrifying. His forty-yard-dash time wasn’t anything special, either, but he says that he could run down faster opponents because he always had sense where he was in relation to the blur of bodies around him—he could “understand the situation.” Page is now an Associate Justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court. “Being a football player requires you to take your emotional self to places that most people shouldn’t go,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to get to know the person who was in my head on a football field. I likely see some of these people in my current job—those who can’t control that person—and they do not very nice things.”
I asked him, “You could control that person on a field?”
“Most of the time,” Page said.
