Athletic Intelligence - A Model for Conceptualizing High Sports IQ

by Brandon Ally & Scott Wylie, S2 Cognition

WHAT IS ATHLETIC INTELLIGENCE OR ATHLETE IQ?

The concept of IQ has an interesting mystique in sports. What exactly are we talking about when we say an athlete has a high “Sports IQ”? At S2 Cognition, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, studying, and discussing this with some of the best minds in sports. We previously wrote about the 5 buckets of athletic performance (see that article here), where we describe a TACTICAL bucket, which is filled with things like game knowledge, experience, and situational awareness. While there may be some genetic component to these things, we speculate that tactical game knowledge comes from thousands of hours of game experience, watching game film and learning from it, paying attention to coaches and mentors, and applying that to play. When watching basketball, a player who routinely makes the right decision for a given situation is described as having a “high basketball IQ.” For lack of better terminology, we think people use IQ here as a descriptor of “sports related smarts” because we know making the right decision in a split-second based on what they see has very little to do with actual IQ.

DOES SPORTS IQ HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH TRADITIONAL IQ OR INTELLIGENCE?

In classic psychology and neuropsychology, IQ (or intelligence quotient) broadly encompasses human “reasoning skills” that unfold over seconds to minutes, where an individual typically can think through and monitor their decisions. Classic measures of IQ (from tests like Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Stanford-Binet, Raven’s Progressive Matrices, the Wide Range Intelligence Test, RBANS) assess concepts like vocabulary, arithmetic, memory for pictures or designs, putting blocks together to match a pattern, mental rotation of objects, pattern matching, completing mazes, very simple reactions, or matching symbols with numbers as quickly as you can over tens of seconds (which is often called “processing speed”). Even IQ tests used in the sports world (Wonderlic, AIQ) are still based on classical IQ methods (e.g., mazes, learning lists of words, reasoning answers to questions, picture matching) and theories (e.g., Cattell-Horn Model of Intelligence), so it’s not surprising that they correlate with traditional IQ. While these measures are important to understand a person’s ability to operate in the world and everyday life (and perhaps understand and digest things like the playbook), they have limited application to speed and complexity of playmaking and split-second decision-making in the sports arena.

To that end, research has shown little evidence that intelligence or IQ score is correlated with individual fast-paced decision-making aspects of cognition. Anecdotally, we’ve likely all known athletes who struggled to perform in the classroom but crushed it on the athletic field, or vice versa, crushed the classroom but couldn’t get it done on the field. To support this anecdotal assertion, we can examine some of the known Wonderlic statistics and analytics in the NFL. The Wonderlic is scored from 1 to 50. Psychometric data from the company shows that the average score is 24 and scores 10 and lower suggests someone who is unable to read or write. The following table taken from Paul Zimmerman’s, “The New Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football” shows the average Wonderlic score for various professions as well as specific positions in football (scroll right if on mobile).

OCCUPATION	SCORE		POSITION	SCORE
Chemist	31		Offensive Line	26
Programmer	29		Quarterback	24
Journalist	26		Tight End	22
Sales	24		Safety	19
Bank Teller	22		Linebacker	19
Clerical