Johnny Manziel’s Wonderlic Score: With extra time leading up to the draft things like Wonderlic scores are getting over-analyzed even more this year.
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Johnny Football and the Wonderlic
Former Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel is one of the most polarizing players in recent history, college or professional. People love his improvisational style and results, but many hate the overconfident, over-the-top, sometimes cocky and arrogant Johnny Football.
With the draft drawing near the spotlight has been magnified on Manziel. Teams want to know if he is all athleticism and luck or if he has the mental capacity to learn and evolve into an elite NFL quarterback. While it will be impossible to know that until he’s drafted and starts playing on Sunday teams have their own way of trying to predict itâ€"the Wonderlic Test.
The Wonderlic Test
Football players at every level have to undergo testing at one time or another like running a 40-yard dash, bench press (max lift or repetitions of 225 lb), broad jump, vertical jumpâ€"basically all sorts of physical tests. Every coach will tell you the same thing when it comes to those test. They don’t mean someone is going to be a good football player.
Yet we do them all anyway in high school, college, and even the professional level. When it comes to the NFL there is another test that is supposed to measure another ‘muscle’â€"the brain. It’s called the Wonderlic; a test with 50 questions that players get 12 minutes to answer as many as they can.
Football fans have been hearing about this test for yearsâ€"usually when someone has an unbelievably bad one (right Vince Young?).  Manziel’s is on the higher side though. So why does that matter? Should it?
Johnny Manziel’s Wonderlic Score
The World Wide Web has been abuzz over Manziel’s scoreâ€"a 32. It’s not the highest of the quarterbacks tested at the Combine. That honor went to Cornell’s Jeff Mathews (40). Manziel’s 32 is the highest of the top QB’s in the draft; Blake Bortles scored a 28 and Teddy Bridgewater scored a 20.
So he scored better than the other guys vying to be the No. 1 pick in the draftâ€"but should it matter? To decide that it may help to review the scores of some current NFL quarterbacks:
Eli Manning 39, Tony Romo 37, Andrew Luck 37, Aaron Rodgers 35, Tom Brady 33, Johnny Manziel 32, Peyton Manning 28.
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Not bad company, right? Here are some more:
Blane Gabbert 42, Drew Henson 42, Alex Smith 40, Charlie Fry 38, Matt Flynn 38, Christian Ponder 35, Matt Lienart 35.
With that in mind should we care that Johnny Manziel’s is the highest of the draft’s top quarterback prospects this year? No. Just like every other test football players take it does not measure how well a person can play. However, it appears that it has done something off value for him.
Media perception has started to turn on Manziel. Even though he has behaved relatively well over the last year many still refer back to the Manziel that posted all sorts of pictures to social media sites and often got in to Twitter beefs with random people. Although he has sworn off of Twitterâ€"and stayed offâ€"some still hold on to what he did over a year ago.
If media perception can turn public perception it will be a lot easier for whoever does take him in the draft to do so.
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