Everyone knows the Wonderlic is utterly meaningless.  I mean, Dan Marino scored a 16 and Alex Smith a 41…but which would you rather have at quarterback?  Exactly.  You don’t take the guy who can ace a culturally-biased IQ test but can’t hit the out-route to save his life…you take the dude who’s dumb as a bag of hammers but can nail a receiver between the eyes from forty yards.  Clearly, football player ability, especially the mental side, can’t be that easily quantified.  And yet, every year we make a big deal out of the meaningless Wonderlic, the same way we make a big deal out of 40 times at the combine.  Why?  Is it simply our need to impose a false sense of order on something that can’t be comprehended by the human mind?  Do we focus on these utterly useless numbers for the same reason we see dippers and scorpions in the sky when everyone sane knows the stars aren’t actually a giant connect-the-dots game used by weird-smelling chicks in silk veils to tell us if we’re going to win the lottery or come down with a bad case of inoperable brain cancer in the next six months?

Well, yes, but that’s not all of it.  The rest of it, I suspect, is that when a guy gets a really bad Wonderlic score, it makes all us poor schlubs who will never be paid millions of dollars to play pro football feel better about our inferiority.  It makes it easier to deal with the fact that, however smart we may be, we will never land the class of tail some borderline retard with a great arm or great feet or the ability to maul someone at the line of scrimmage can.  We like the Wonderlic, in short, because we hate ourselves.

It feels good to make someone else into a laughing-stock…especially when that someone is a college stud who is about to be paid an obscene amount of money for doing something utterly frivolous.  That’s why, when Vince Young scored a 6 on the Wonderlic, everyone started giggling their asses off and calling him bad names like “moron,” “imbecile” and “George Bush.”  Unfortunately, you can only make fun of a guy like Vince for so long before it gets old.  Fortunately, the Wonderlic is administered to draft prospects every year, so there’s always someone new to take Vince’s place.

So who among this year’s high-profile draft prospects scored poorly enough on the Wonderlic to deserve our scorn and derision?  Sadly, no one managed a Vince-level score that we know of.  The lowest yet leaked is the 11 posted by Hakeem Nicks, wide receiver from North Carolina.  But Nicks isn’t a big enough name, plus North Carolina isn’t enough of a football school.  We need someone from a real football school like USC.  Someone everyone’s heard of.  Someone who once walked up behind Erin Andrews during a game and lewdly ground his hips.  Someone who was out-lifted by a freaking punter at the combine.

Yes, Rey Maualuga.  He’s weaker than a punter and also, going by the average Wonderlic score for people in various professions, dumber than a security guard.  But probably smarter than most people who went to see Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

Actually, Rey scored a 15, which is probably not horrible for a linebacker from USC.  If you go to USC and can manage to read the menu at a Jack in the Box without help, you’re a candidate for the Dean’s List.  If you want to find someone really dumb, you have to go all the way across the country to Florida, where winning National Championships is clearly a much higher priority than graduating people who can function in society.  Honestly, Percy Harvin – a 12 on the Wonderlic?  Don’t you get 5 points for spelling your name right and another 3 for correctly identifying the color blue?  That’s 8 right there.  And you only managed another 4.  You could’ve scored higher than 12 just by taking “C” all the way through.

Okay, so maybe I’m being a little too hard on these guys.  They are football players after all.  It’s not like they actually studied or went to class in college.  Most of these kids haven’t been tested on anything since about 4th grade, when they first evinced athletic talent and started to be pampered like a sheik’s hottest harem girls.  The Wonderlic is probably a shock to their system.  “You mean I have to take it myself?  I can’t have a booster hire someone to dress like me and take it for me?”  Imagine how you’d feel if you got away with being a flaming moron most of your life and suddenly someone was asking you the absolute value of -9.  All you know is that, if you end up with -9 yards at the end of a game, coach won’t give you one of those little buckeye stickers to put on your helmet.  Unless you threaten him.

Like I said before, Wonderlic scores are fun and help our self-esteem, but when it comes to judging a person’s future as an NFL player, completely useless.  Consider, once again, the Vince Young case.  He only scored a 6…but look at where he is now.

Okay…bad example.