Welcome back Chicago Bears fans!
After a temporary hiatus following the Super Bowl, I am back in business with my first column of draft season.
You can never have too much of a good thing they say – although that is not how I felt at 2am on Super Bowl Monday after imbibing 10 pints of strong ale.
The half time cocktails finished me off, and I was sleeping like a baby by the end of the third quarter.
For the second successive year I was asleep before the trophy presentation, tarnishing my record of viewing the previous 24 Super Bowl games live and in their entirety.
The Combine has come and gone, although I would be lying if I said I was a fan of watching kids from Iowa State bouncing off tackle bags in a desperate attempt to get from one end of the pitch to another.
The main business of the week is done in the boardroom, and I am even less of a fan now they have scrapped the Wonderlic test.
The wonderful Wonderlic
For the uninitiated, the Wonderlic test was an IQ test introduced to the NFL to determine the cognitive ability of draft prospects.
Imagine having to take an IQ test before signing for a club in the Premier League. In that alternate universe, would Joey Barton have the social media platform he does today?
I took the test myself and scored a perfect 25 out of 25 – until I realised there were actually 50 questions and I had taken twice as long as I should have done on each.
That was one point less than Bears quarterback ‘smokin’ Jay Cutler, who scored 26 on his pre-draft examination. Fellow quarterback Rex Grossman scored 29 and Mitch Trubisky also hit the 25 mark.
Scores are only revealed to the public in leaks or after the event conversations, so there is no comprehensive database of scores – purely a smattering of information which appears over time.
The highest score known for a quarterback from any team was Ryan Fitzpatrick, with the Harvard graduate scoring a whopping 48 points. Another Harvard product, punter Pat McInally, scored the tests only perfect 50 on record.
Wonder no more
In 2022 the NFL discontinued the test for draft prospects, viewing it as outdated and irrelevant to a players on-field performance.
The test was replaced in part by the S2 decision making test, primarily used for assessing quarterbacks reactionary intelligence. Justin Fields famously scored a maximum 130 on this test back in 2021 – for comparison Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen both scored 108.
But just as the Wonderlic faded due to confidentiality concerns, top players have now started to abscond, and there does not seem to be any evidence last year’s top pick Caleb Williams took the S2.
Williams decided to skip all medical tests at the Combine, instead choosing to only take medicals with interested teams.
So the Wonderlic is gone, but the countdown to the draft is on, and in my next column I will be looking at the Bears’ top targets and positional needs.
In the meantime, I will also be researching energy supplements in a bid to avoid a hat trick of Super Bowl disappointment next February.
