The NFL did away with its use of the Wonderlic test ahead of the 2022 scouting combine. That hasn’t stopped franchises from finding new methods by which to measure the cognitive abilities of prospects—especially quarterbacks—and the leaked scores of some of this year’s top signal-callers have started to make their way into the narratives surrounding those players.
The new test du jour comes from Nashville’s S2 Cognition, and has been in use by teams for upwards of seven years, according to longtime NFL writer Bob McGinn of Go Long.
Citing multiple sources, McGinn, who NFL fans and diehard draft followers likely know as the reporter responsible for publishing Wonderlic scores for years, reports that Alabama’s Bryce Young is tops in the quarterback class, scoring in the 98th percentile. Fresno State’s Jake Haener is at 96%, Kentucky’s Will Levis and BYU’s Jaren Hall are at 93%, and Houston’s Clayton Tune is at 84%. Anthony Richardson of Florida is just a hair below the “elite” range at 79%, while Tennessee’s Hendon Hooker is at 46%. C.J. Stroud, the Ohio State prospect who has been in the mix with Young for the No. 1 pick, meanwhile, is down at 18%, according to McGinn. An anonymous league executive told McGinn that he believes the score might take Stroud off some teams’ draft boards.
One of the founders of S2, however, says to take all leaked scores with a “grain of salt.”
In an interview with Pro Football Focus published before McGinn’s report but after some rumored scores for players in this draft had already emerged online, cofounder Brandon Ally said that the company is “aware of scores being leaked, and we’re not sure where that’s coming from, but I will say take some of those with a grain of salt.”
“We have seen, ‘Hey, so-and-so scored the highest in the class, or the highest ever, and so-and-so scored low,’ and it’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s not true,’” Ally continued. “With that being said, this class as a whole—all the guys in the discussion—have scored really, really well.”
In a February article for The Athletic, Matt Barrows described the test as “like the 40-yard dash for the brain.” The 40 to 45 minute test, which is run through a gaming laptop, measures the players’ ability to rapidly disseminate information that appears on the screen in front of them.
“We’re talking about things they have to perceive on the screen within 16/1,000th of a second, which is essentially subliminal and which scientific literature says you shouldn’t be able to process,” Ally told The Athletic. “And I’ll be honest with you, we’re seeing pro baseball players see something way faster than 16 milliseconds, which has never been reported in literature, all the way to some athletes who may take 150 milliseconds. So our eyes may see the same thing. But for some, it takes longer to process than others.”
Brock Purdy, whose surprising rise during the 2022 season seemed impossible to predict, scored in the “mid 90s” on the test, Ally says, a similar range to Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and Drew Brees have landed on the test. Joe Burrow was in the 97th percentile of scorers, he said with the quarterback’s permission.
Ally said that anything over the 80% mark is considered “elite.”
Speaking to PFF, Ally said that while he’d love for GMs to only draft high-S2-scoring players as an experiment, he does not believe his company’s test will ever fully supersede the other methods by which NFL teams evaluate talent.
“If I’m a general manager, it’s more likely that I’m going to utilize this tool if we love two players the same. We love their physical makeup, we love their psychological makeup, we had great interviews with them. One has a high S2, one has a modest S2, it can be a separator from that perspective,” he said. “I just don’t see GMs and front offices saying, ’We don’t really like this guy, but his S2’s good, so let’s take him.’”
