It is unfortunate that
overcompensatory masculinity has become so pervasive that it’s set the standard
for many people’s perceptions of masculinity.
Idiotic sports – and, more broadly, idiocy – are considered masculine.
Men used to be perfectly
acceptable for a man to be both good and intelligent; now, many males find
these characteristics weak and effeminate.
Not only is the choice
to watch or play football a stupid decision, football itself thrives on this
very anti-intellectualism. Witness the
derision directed toward “eggheads” or computer formulas in Bowl Championship
Series determinations. Or, the disdain heaped
on David Romer for suggesting – after carefully analyzing the evidence of
thousands and thousands of plays – that teams ought to “go for it” on fourth
down more frequently than they do.
“If we all listened to
the professor, we may all be looking for professor jobs,” professional coach
Bill Cowher pontificated.
If you get a chance,
read the paper – entitled “Do Firms
Maximize? Evidence from Professional
Football” – and draw your own conclusions.
The evidence is strong and fairly cut-and-dried: football coaches almost
certainly adhere to conventional wisdom at the expense of their probability of
winning the game.
Why didn’t a single team
contact Romer, despite the significant media attention paid to his paper? Why would they willingly ignore beneficial
advice?
Short answer: because
they’re stupid.
Slightly longer answer:
because they’re anti-intellectual.
Intelligence (or, anything other than “football intelligence”, or the
ability to make decisions in keeping with prevailing football mythology or sentiment)
can actually impede your chances of rising to the top.
Case in point: the
“Wonderlic” test is a 50-question assessment administered to potential NFL
draftees. Sample questions include:
- If
pads of paper are 21 cents each, how much would four pads cost?
- A
train travels 20 feet in of a second. How far will it travel in three seconds?
- Which
of these represents the smallest amount?
- 7
- .8
- 31
- .33
- 2
Of
the fifteen sample questions online at http://espn.go.com/page2/s/closer/020228test.html
, I got fifteen correct in about five minutes.
This is not the world’s most difficult assessment. – I would expect
second graders to get many of the questions correct.
Some teams pay close attention to all
results. All teams pay attention to some
of the results: the ones at either extreme.
If players cannot score above ten out of fifty, most teams regard it as
a red flag. However, it is also a red
flag if players score too high.
Apparently, even team
executives know you’ve got to be stupid to play football.
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