It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that an athlete (or person in general) who has had issues in the past is more likely to have those occur again than an athlete who hasn’t had issues.
That is one of the things NFL teams have to decide upon when drafting a player. The talent is there, but “can the teams trust the player in question to stay out of legal trouble and out of Roger Goodell’s office?” is the question.
The two players most notably under that microscope this year have been Noah Spence, a pass rusher from Eastern Kentucky who was banned from the Big Ten for extensive drug use, and Robert Nkemdiche, who received a marijuana possession charge after falling from a hotel balcony.
A group of college professors and researchers did a study that looked at off-duty deviance in professional settings, and the researchers had two NFL draft-related results, according to ESPN’s Kevin Seifert:
First, that between 2001 and 2012, players with publicly-documented pre-draft arrests were nearly twice as likely to be arrested after reaching the NFL than those who had not been arrested. The second, which is perhaps less obvious and more valuable, was that there was a small but clear correlation between arrests and Wonderlic tests scores. Players who scored below the mean in the researchers’ sample were also about twice as likely to be arrested in the NFL as those who scored above it.
And even though the effects may not be large, this is the NFL we’re talking about — every little advantage helps.
“The effects are relatively small,” said author Brian Hoffman, an associate professor and chair of the industrial-organizational program at the University of Georgia. “But it’s important here because when making multimillion-dollar decisions, a small effect can be very meaningful. A player’s getting a four-game suspension can be a big deal, competitively and financially.”[…]“If I were a decision-maker, I wouldn’t view getting into trouble as a zero-sum game,” Hoffman said. “You check off that they’ve been in trouble and know what that has meant for others on a percentage basis. And then there’s a factor that would make the likelihood a little worse: If they score lower on the Wonderlic. Really, that tells you there’s even more work to do there.”
Now, of course, these things aren’t givens — that a player who has been in trouble in the past will absolutely get in trouble in the future. But ESPN’s Louis Riddick notes that it’s how the situation is handled as opposed to just taking the situation for what it is.
“Everyone is looking for ways to predict future performance,” Riddick said, “whether it is through three-cone tests, shuttle drills or anything else. Then they assume that these guys have it figured out once you get them, and they don’t. That’s where the focus should be, helping them be better people and players, rather than hiring a psychologist to tell you which players are more or less likely to get arrested.“Because the reality is, you just don’t know, and you can’t know when it comes to human nature. It’s so hard. You can talk to everyone, from the friends to the coaches to the gas-station attendants, and so many times you’re literally just holding on and hoping you’ve done your best evaluation. Human development off the field is something that is lagging in this league and has to be ramped up and taken more seriously.”
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