(Photo: Brittany Randolph)
The following is a cross-post from NFL.com, where we’ve recently launched a Football Freakonomics project.
There are a lot of things that need to go right for any given person to succeed in the NFL. We know all the stories about bad breaks, freak injuries, and mismatched coaches. On the flipside, we know how much hard work, discipline, and even luck go into a successful career.
In this installment of Football Freakonomics, we take a step back to ask the most basic question: are great players born or are they made? In other words, how much does raw talent matter?
It is of course an impossible question to fully answer. Maybe someday scientists will be allowed to run the kind of experiments that yield an answer. How would that work? They’d take 10,000 boys, measure their athletic abilities, and then evenly divide the boys into two groups. Over the course of many years, Group A would play football but not be required (or even allowed) to work very hard. Group B would play football but also be pushed to the max in training. Then, when the boys got to be NFL age, you’d see how the most “talented” kids from Group A compared to the less “talented” kids from Group B, and vice versa. In that way, you’d begin to get a sense of how much talent truly matters.
Fortunately, scientists aren’t (yet) allowed to run such experiments.
So we poke around the existing data and try our best to figure things out. By now a lot of people are familiar with the “10,000-hour rule,” the idea that no one gets excellent at anything unless they put in roughly 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice,” which we first wrote about back in 2006. It indeed presents a compelling argument: a growing body of research suggests that the elites in any field, whether it’s surgery, music, or sports, are not necessarily the people who were most “talented” at a young age, but rather the ones who wound up working the hardest over many years.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? This explanation also appeals to our moral sense: it’s only fair that the people who work hardest have the best chance of succeeding. And you can see time and again in the NFL that the most “talented” guys – the ones who outshine everyone in strength and speed at the Combine, for instance (see details in the graphic here) – aren’t necessarily the guys who succeed in the long run.
But there’s also a strong counter-argument in the NFL to be made for raw talent. Consider this fact: of the roughly 1,900 players on NFL rosters this season, 20 of them have fathers who also played in the NFL, or about 1 percent. That doesn’t sound like much, does it? But there are more than 20 million men in the U.S. of NFL age – and only 1,900 of them are in the NFL! That’s one guy for every 11,000 people in that age range – or about 1 1/1000th of a percent. How do you like those odds?
So while it’d be foolish to argue that hard work and determination and coaching don’t help to make great players great, it’d be just as foolish to ignore the genetic evidence in front of us. It may also be that the traits that contribute to excellence in various fields (computer science, medicine, the arts) are less hereditable than the traits that are important in sports. One obvious factor is size, which is strongly hereditable.
So yes, we should respect and honor the back-breaking work and diligence that every NFL player has shown. But we shouldn’t deny the edge that genes can provide. In other words: if someone offers you a bet that there’ll be an NFL quarterback named Manning in the 2030’s, you might want to take the bet.
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Size and speed are the most obvious genetic traits. You can lack one or the other (Vince Wilfork vs Darren Sproles) but never both….unless you’re a kicker – in which case you aren’t even a real football player anyway so it doesn’t matter.
I used to be big into bike racing and came to learn that, genetically speaking, I could train 8 hours a day and would never be much better than the best rider in my club. Just not built for it. The best pro cyclists have deep chests, and long leg bones, not to mention off-the-charts ability to process oxygen. Like this guy: http://www.cyclinghalloffame.com/riders/pics/indurain_m5.jpg and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Indurain Look at the length of his thigh bone! Pure leverage that muscle alone cannot match.
Every guy my age got Greg LeMond’s book and set about becoming the next LeMond. I realized how hard it would be for me when I went through his steps to fit a bike and realized that, even though I am 6’2″ and he was 5’8″, our legs measured out exactly the same. In other words, he was all legs and lungs and I wasn’t.
Then there is Michael Phelps, who supposedly has the ideal body for a swimmer, even if he “looks like an alien” as his Mom once said.
Exposure to the sport – as well as peer pressure – needs to be examined as well. For example, a friend coached baseball in Orange County, California and he was always complaining about his inability to attract talent at one school while he had an overabundance at another. The difference, he claimed, was the 405 Freeway. It effectively splits the county into east and west, the latter having the beach – the California Riviera. East of the 405 the schools regularly turned out great football, basketball, and baseball teams but no worthwhile watersport teams – and vice-versa. Proximity to the beach (exposure) is a big influencer. Wealth (living close to or on the California coastline) probably does too. In the UK, it should be noted, that the wealthy don’t often respect “football” – it’s a gentleman’s game played by hooligans after all.
The comments so far are right on:
1. Few children are likely to grow up as immersed in football as children of NFL players — who therefore are more likely to put in the required hours.
2. A fairly small portion of the population is physically big and strong enough to play in the NFL. We know these factors have a significant genetic component.
3. Although nepotism may play some role, there’s also the subtler factor of having insider information. Often knowing the details of how a system works gives one an advantage in the system.
A more interesting experiment would be to compare the representation of children of players with the children of scouts, coaches and other non-players in the NFL. These children would have most of the environmental components and few of the genetic components.
I agree with genetics and hard work
influencing success but what about the technology component. Where does that factor into the hypothesis. Has there been any studies done?
Oh oh! You also need to be raised in a state that cares about football. Good luck making in the NFL if you’re from Alaska, or Vermont.
Although if you’re from Vermont you can have an emerging maple syrup conglomerate….or an NPO where homeless people take the fur…er wool, of sheep and sow it into clothes for other homeless people to sell….Holy Shirts & Pants.
In noting the percentage of NFL players with NFL players for fathers, you seem to assume that NFL player genes are the sole reason that they are in the NFL.
Isn’t it equally likely that they worked hard and focused their efforts on matching their father’s achievements, that they were driven by expectations of an NFL career, or that they were privy to insight that other aspiring football players were not?
Matthew Syed’s excellent book “Bounce” is worth a look if you are interested in some background reading on this subject.