Wonder All You Want, But Vince Young is the Real Deal

Many people close to the league are saying the first test was graded incorrectly, and that upon taking it a second time, Young scored a more respectable, but still very low, 16. So, with nothing but time on their hands to crunch numbers and make up stories to fill their papers’ columns, some sports writers are pegging Young as a late top-10 pick. Since when did a test ever give an exact estimation of how one could do when it came down to actually getting the job done? And this question can extend beyond the world of sports. Surely there are plenty of people who did excellent in law school and passed the bar exam with flying colors but then froze up when they found themselves inside a court room. Just because a person does well on the MCAT does not mean we want them performing open-heart surgery on us. And just because Vince Young does not know the transitive property (an application on one of the Wonderlic test questions) does not mean we would rather have Jay Cutler in the huddle with a big game on the line.

We took 20 of the Wonderlic questions and finished them in four minutes. We got every question right, but we are the last person in the world you want lined up trying to discern the difference between a man-formation and a cover-2. Eli Manning scored a 39 on the Wonderlic two years ago, about the same number of interceptions he threw this past season. Hollywood Henderson once said of Terry Bradshaw that he could not spell "cat" if you spotted him the "c" and the "a." Last we checked, Bradshaw had a handful of rings from his four trips to the Super Bowl and a trophy case full of Super Bowl MVPs.

Multiple choice tests may give an indication of some general mental aptitude, but as one NFL executive recently said, those test scores are best used as tiebreakers, if at all. Heart; determination; leadership; fire. Those things do not show up on any test. And when you hear players talk about being in "the zone," they usually say that is the time your brain turns off. You go on instinct and natural ability. You find a way to win. When Vince Young painted his masterpiece in Pasadena in January, there were no No.2 pencils. There were no Scantron sheets. There was one thing and one thing only, the determination to win, no matter what the cost. Young has that in spades, and no test can measure it.