Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre. And today we're going to find out what this sound is.

I did notice you had some pretty thick soles on.

Okay. A lug sole is a fashion choice. It is a fashion choice. Right after this ad.

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Girof Kings Network.

So I'm playing Heard today.

Yeah, I can tell. You sound like you should not be here. According to 2023 standards of what we do with sickness.

Are you sick? No. Okay. I have tested negative for all viruses that I know of. You've been clearing your throat.

Into the microphone for the last 10 minutes. And so I just want to know what's wrong.

With you. So I went to a holiday party on Friday. And just because I was talking loudly over the like the den of the room.

It's not that you're hungover. Is that you're gas bag too much?

Come on, dude. I'm just constantly, I'm drinking my tea. It's.

You sound like you're going to choke.

I should point out that I've been thinking a lot about choking recently. I was watching the NFL this weekend, Cortez, and I've been monitoring one particular subplot. And it involves a team that has been choking the Carolina Panthers. The Panthers, you may remember, just fired head coach, just fired the quarterbacks coach. Josh McCown. Josh McCown. Love that dude. The people that the fans of the Panthers are going to war with, though, seemed to be anybody who told them that Bryce Young was going to be awesome. Bryce Young, the number one overall pick of 2023 out of Alabama. He just did this against the Bucks on Sunday. Young will throw on fourth out. He's directing traffic for Thiel and Thiel had had a kick and it's intercepted. Ninety-nine, and tried to win fields.

That makes the Panthers now one and 11, I believe.

Correct. One and 11, Bryce Young has been dog shit all season, and they traded up to take him. Remember, he was going to be the savior, but instead, he's been failing every exam and choking repeatedly. It's a first in 10 in Young. Underneath, it's picked off. And here comes the veteran, Kenny Moore, chased by Young. That is a big six. Here's Bryce Young. He's got time here. And he throws and.

It's intercepted. It's Cerron Blanding again. Bland looking for another big six, and he's got it.

It's bad. That footage cut my heart. It really hurt me as a short king because I'm rooting for the fellow short king, and he's embarrassing us out here.

I'm just cough, laugh, and.

Just- Horrible.

So the thing that makes this all that much more horrible for the Panthers is that C. J. Straud, who's the quarterback out of Ohio State, who they took number two overall, the Houston Texans did.

Right behind.

Bryce Young. Right behind Bryce Young, just beat the Broncos on Sunday to get the Texans into playoff position. They're now seven and five. And he's been fucking awesome.

Yeah. He's been looking like this. Tons of fun to watch.

Straud on first down. He was looking downfield. He's going downfield toward the end zone. Del, leapy grab. He's got it.

A hundred and fifty-seven passes without a pick. Straud tosses it up there and caught by Jordan. That's just CJ Straud having a ridiculous amount of ability.

Stout to the end zone. Touchdown. Tank, Del. Cj Stout leads a.

Magical drive.

This young man.

Is special.

Yeah, the dude has set records for passing Yara to 12 games for a rookie quarterback. He was an offensive player of the month in the AFC in November. He just won back-to-back games with game-wining drives, first rookie to do that in, I believe, 40 years.

It proves nobody knows anything with quarterbacks. It is one of the hardest things to do in all the sports is to pick quarterbacks. Correct. Right?

It's incredibly difficult. No one has to be confident in doing that. No one should be confident, at least. But one way that they try to figure out who is actually a potential franchise guy is that they test for intelligence, right? Because this is not just an athletic position. It is a position in which your brain, your decision making, your processing, all that stuff is incredibly important. And so this is a storyline that came up when C. J. Straud played the Falcons in week five. After the Wunderlic test, the scores.

Weren't great, shaking a preseason.

Debut, some said, but since then, he has impressed.

He's been unbelievable. And if I was in charge of the Players Association, there is no way any of my players would ever take a Wonderlic test again because it's completely unfair. And this kid has just been awesome. Across the body, beautiful placement. And this is what this kid has done. So the Wonderlic test, who gives a rip?

It is rare that I agree with Mark Schlariff, I will say. Stink. Stink. Manly, man-off. But I do agree with Schlerith here. Why are we testing these guys in this manner?

But Mark Schlerith was also crucially, incredibly wrong about the details in that call. Because the Wonderlic test, actually, I don't know if people know this, the Wonderlic was stopped as the thing that every player had to take at the Combine, the pre-draft thing, last year. So last year, it was, for the first time, not required for every prospect to take it. The thing that CJ Strauss did bomb, though, the test he did fail, the intelligence test that he got an 18 out of 99 on was called the S2 test.

That sounds like a Terminator robot, not like an.

Sat test. The S2 is the thing that's replaced the Wonderlic. And it's the thing that has also raised the eyebrows of our smart nerd friends. I've been talking to them all month about this test, what they think of it. And a lot of them think it's just bullshit because in part, CJ's Shrowd is awesome. And because Bryce Young, who sucks, got a 98 out of 99.

What a nerd.

But what is not controversial is the fact that intelligence testing is the holy grail in the NFL for quarterbacks specifically, and also in sports as people try to figure out, okay, scouts, executives, GMs, who's actually talented enough to be a superstar, to be a franchise guy for a team? And so what I wanted to do was figure out, okay, who's somebody who is themselves a number one overall pick, a phenomenal test taker, and someone who played like utter dog shit as a rookie quarterback in the league? And I wanted to find out from them, can we actually test for intellect? Can we actually measure how smart somebody is in a way that actually matters to their performance as an athlete?

Yeah. Whether their shit is bullshit or not. Yes. Absolutely. Are you going to take the test yourself?

Well, now that you mentioned it.

Come.

On, dude. I've been waiting.

You sound so horrible.

You sound so bad. I've been waiting to take these tests.

This is ridiculous. Are you doing a bit?

What is this? I should probably take another test before I take those tests.

You should take medicine.

I'm going to take multiple tests. Okay. Alex, I want you to know that I think of you as an intelligent person.

Thank you. I mean, listen, I don't want to come up with any Harvard, Ivy League jokes for you. I feel like every person I know from Harvard or the Ivy League, they just drop it randomly in sentences more often than not. Nobody else talks about their alma mater- What do you mean? -as much as people that went to Harvard. What? You know what? It just constantly comes out. But no, thank you. I appreciate that.

I was hoping you would say what you just said in response to me complimenting you in that way so I could point out that, in fact, yes, I did go to a certain school outside of Boston. Yeah, that's right.

Is it like a junior college or something?

Okay, so that is the voice of my old friend and ESPN daily colleague, Alex Smith, who graduated from the University of Utah in two years and got taken number one overall in the 2005 NFL draft by the San Francisco Forty Niders. In no small part, by the way, because of his intellect as no less than Mel Kiper Jr, explained repeatedly at the time.

As I said.

And this cannot be understated, the smartest player ever to go from College of Pro processes.

Information so quickly, an offensive coordinator's.

Dream because he's an extension of the.

Coordinator, of the head coach. No mistakes are going to be made.

In translation with Alex Smith. But the offensive coordinators in San Francisco were a nightmare for Alex because he had seven of them. And then he got traded to the Kansas City Chiefs, where he became the personal to his backup, Patrick Mohomes. Having Alex, man.

I'll forever say him, man.

It probably made my game jump three steps when I could have took three years to get those three steps.

I had seven offensive coordinators in six.

Years in San Francisco, man. I mean, he literally had to learn to trial by fire, and he taught me how to not make those same mistakes. And so that's how Alex Smith helped make the greatest young quarterback who has ever lived. And that is how Mr. Smith wound up going to Washington, where his new head coach, Jay Grudin, had, again, a familiar scatting report. One thing about.

Alex, he's the smartest guy I've ever been around, without a doubt.

I know a little bit about your biography. Not a lot of it, but a little bit. I mean, you took some... Your dad was the principal of your high school, which means that you're already rolling your eyes at this memory.

Well, yeah. So my junior and senior year when all my friends were, especially senior year, taking light class loads and senioritis and doing whatever they want, having fun. I didn't even get to make my own schedule. My dad was the principal. So academics are obviously really important. So I took every AP class there was. What a nerd. I endedup taking, I think, I took 14 AP tests by the time I left high school. I had.

So many more than I ever- It was a lot. -all of which brings me around to this idea that in the NFL, you got labeled Smart Guy. Some of your NFL coaches have called you literally the smartest guy they've ever been around.

It's so funny. I remember even getting ready for the draft, and it was the same thing. You're going to take this Wonderlic.

The Wonderlic test tells NFL Scals how smart their.

Prospects are. It goes way beyond football. The Wonderlic test is also frequently used by Fortune 500 companies to help assess possible new hires. The Wonderlic test has been.

A staple.

Of NFL player evaluation since the 1970s. The Wonderlic tested math, vocabulary, and logic and.

Had.

Visual puzzles. Folks out there could probably google Wonderlic questions at this point. They can get them, but it has nothing to do with football, Pablo. It's actually like this very logical based...

Oh, I wanted... This is why I've summoned you here is to ask if you remember what you got on the Wonderlic.

I think I got like a 40 or something.

Yeah. So Alex Smith, for the record here got one of the top 10 published quarterback scores on record. A 40 out of 50, 50-point scale, 50 point scale, 50questions, 12 minutes. Slacker. Yeah, I know. What the fuck did you get wrong?

There's the difference right there, Harvard and Utah.

But hold on, though, because the Wonderlic for people who don't know, how do you describe what it is, what it was.

This was easy pickings, Pablo. The crazy part is once you've declared to come out pro and you get an agent, I took three or four practice Wonderlicks, and they graded. You'd get the results back time. So I walked into that really, really comfortable. But certainly, I thought about some of my peers, depending on your background and where you grew up, again, this had nothing to do with football.

It's fine. I'm good. I cannot emphasize enough what you're saying there as, yeah, by the way, the number one overall pick in 2005 to the 49ers because I took a Wunderlic test, a practice test, today, right before this, I got a 44.

There we go.

You.

Would have been a hell of a quarterback, Pablo.

And I want to say for people who don't know, and I only got to... So it's timed. The time is real. I only got to 49 questions.

I didn't answer all of them either. I think I answered all but three. Exactly. And they get progressively harder for everybody out there. They start really easy and the back half of it is they take longer, they're wordier.

It's funny. I went back and looked at the questions I got wrong because that's how I'm a kid who had SAT tutoring before the SAT, of course, because I went to, I don't know, maybe you've heard of it. I went to Harvard. I studied my ass off for that thing. Here's a sample question from the WNDYRLK I took today. Which word does not belong? Okay, four options: optician, orthodontist, dentist, optometrist.

I'm going optician.

You got this right. Okay, so I was like, are we just insulting opticians here? They didn't have the credentials? Is that why that's the right answer?

The other three all work on people. An optician is- Oh, like the- -classes, I'm assuming.

Oh, wow. Now I'm embarrassed. I don't know.

You're exactly right.

I chose dentist because it didn't start with an O. But all I wish is to say that these questions have a lot to do with quarterbecking.

No doubt. Honestly, I don't know if anybody's actually revealed what these tests are like.

How did you take it, by the way? Was it on a.

Scantron sheet? Not a Scantron.

Like a bubble of pencil?

It was just like a stapled sheet of paper in the corner. And I'll never forget the three days the whole world, the football world that is, descends on Indianapolis.

Yep, you're all in your underwear.

You honestly are, you want to talk about cattle, poked and prodded at the hospital a long time because if you sprained your ankle in high school, they're going to MRI it and look at it. Obviously, the vast majority of the combine is physical. And it's an audience of scouts and GMs and coaches like hundreds. It's so.

Creepy, dude.

It's creepy. And you're up there and they measure every single part of your body and call it out.

And.

Announce it. I mean, it's uncomfortable.

The wonder, like in terms of results, Ryan Fitzpatrick getting a 48 makes sense. You getting a 40 makes sense. Eli getting a 39. Colin Kaepernick got a 38. Andrew Luck got a 37. Tony Romo got a 37. Aaron Roby got a 35. Some of this does track, just broadly speaking. But at the same time, when Dan Moreno gets a 16, it's weird that this was so important and unchallenged for so long. And the lack of football, which is obvious to you, raises the question of what does intelligence for a quarterback specifically, what does that really mean to you?

Well, going back to your original question, the fact that I could take a few seconds to, for me, make an educated guess that it was optician has absolutely nothing to do with me doing my job at an NFL level, like the actual intelligence that is required — how do youCome on now. Hey, one at a time, huh? Locked in one at a time. The seconds that take place between me getting the play call in my ear, stepping into the huddle, calling the play like having to regurgitate that, obviously having to digest it, potentially give out reminders to anybody — Hey, do you know what's coming? Hey, just trying to look him up. Great job. We break the line, we get up to the huddle. I have my presnapped tells as I'm looking at the defense. Is it first in 10? Are we in third down? What's the situation of the game? Boom, I snapped the ball. And then now we're talking in like fractions of a second, like microseconds here. Your analysis and decision making and processing to go from A to B to C, youknow? And then God forbid that the right guard doesn't block his guy and then all that out the window.

Alex Smith stepping up in the pocket, trying to keep the play alive. Now he'll run.

Break out of the pocket. Don't get sacked. Now at this point, find a guy on the run. Make a play.

Smith flush from the pocket.

Uh-oh. That was on the run, and it is caught. It just has nothing to do with deducing which one of the words didn't go with the other three.

Right. So this was a thing that they mandated at The Combine until last year.

Honestly, the most important thing of all that, all the crap that I just went through is not so much do you have the intelligence and processing, but do you have the guts, the confidence, the calmness given the stage to do it all? And that's probably even.

More important. The pressure, performing under pressure.

Yeah. Do you have it there?

Yeah.

And how do you measure that?

I want to help people who scout players and talk about sports. It's with the vocabulary of this whole exercise. If it's not intelligence, which can mean you ace the verbal part of the SAT, which I can imagine both of us did, it's what is processing? What does it mean? Is it decision making? How are you characterizing what this skill is if it's not intelligence, as has been previously defined? What would you love to test for when it comes to a quarterback that you're about to potentially give nine figures to?

It's the ability to get into a flow state given just large, strong guys trying to rip your head off. Myles Garrett is just crushing the left tackle, play in and play out. He's hit you 15 times. They've been hitting you all day. You've been getting beat up and crushed. Then all of a sudden, a big third down in the fourth quarter, Can you sit in there and lock in? There's so many people's job on the line. Not only your teammates and coaches and the scouts, but I'm talking like the equipment room, the film guys, the trainers, and all their families.

Yes.

Can you lock in? Time slows down almost, and you're so locked in on what you have to do to execute a play. So in the midst of all of that stuff, like external distractions, internal distractions from the pressure of the situation in the moment that it just is you're unflinching.

You described a very unique job.

I think about Brock Purdy. Mr. Relevant, 2022 with a 260-second pick in the 2022 NFL draft, the San Franciscos and the 49ers select Brock Purdy, a quarterback from Iowa State. Go Niner. I mean, he was a four-year starter at Iowa State. How was it that nobody was able to identify what it is that... Those traits.

Right. Last pick of the draft is what he ends up being, despite all the stuff that, again, with hindsight, we can now discern.

Yeah. So is there a test that you could administer? That simulates. I know there's new tests as far as processing that they put kids through.

Yes. So to get to where the NFL is going now, they've tried a couple of replacements.

S2 Cognition delivers the leading digital evaluation that is scientifically validated to measure these cognitive abilities that have been unquantifiable. Until now, the S2 EVAL is designed to analyze how athletes see, think, and react to in-game split-second decisions. It shows who the game-breakers are and how to develop them so that you can build to win.

Okay.

So that, to be clear, is a marketing video for S2 Cognition. This is the company that has become the de facto replacement for the Wonder League test, as aforementioned, in terms of how the NFL measures the brainpower of college players. And the S2 actually first took off in Major League Baseball. And this test, they say, is all about trying to measure cognition, how quickly the human brain reacts and processes information. Like in baseball, for instance, is this pitch a fastball slider change of curveball? That's the speed of decision making that they're testing for. And here in football, it's basically about solving puzzles as fast as possible.

It's blocking out the noise, having a feel for the pressure, adjusting when things break down.

But the problem now with S2 cognition is that the biggest thing breaking down is the quarterback who aced their test. Because Rice Young did get 98 out of 99 on his S2 exam, and that did help him get picked number one overall by the Panthers. And the Texans, by contrast, got CJ Strauss and his 18 out of 99 on the S2, which is again, utterly abysmal. And CJ Strauss is not just the best quarterback in the 2023 draft, it seems like.

What CJ is doing, it's the greatest rookie season we've ever seen in the hardest position in sports. Yes. And there's not a single thing that he's from a maturity, from a processing, from the actual physical play on the field that hasn't just been absolutely astounding. And this is coming from a guy, Pablo, that I had one of the worst rookie seasons in the history of football. To see what he's doing and how hard it is and how easy he's making it look is just ridiculous.

Something that does suck is when your test got leaked.

Yeah, it's.

It's very clear, Alex, that the NFL, sports in general, but specifically with quarterbacks, they're dying to figure out who the smart ones are because we now know, oh, it turns out the brain is an important thing. It's an important body part, this whole thing that processes and makes decisions.

No doubt. I think there's only one thing left to do, man. I think you got to take the S2 test. Maybe we should see if we still got it, Pablo.

All right. Alex Smith, on behalf of both of us, Overachieving Standardized Test-takers, I vow to take this test and see if I am a better quarterback than C. J. Straud.

Oh, God.

That's after the break.

All.

Right, so in front of me is a rig, white keypad, seven buttons, athlete identity confirmation, big green button that says launch, and I got like 45 minutes, so let's fucking find out how good I am. Oh, boy. Fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck does that mean? Motherfuck. Fucking shit. All right, so what you need to know about the S2 test before we get to my test results here is that it is absolutely nothing like the Wonderlic. Insofar as there is none of that SAT style vocabulary and reading comp and basic math question bullshit. The booksmart stuff that Alex Smith and I clearly mastered in our AP classes. Because the S2, it turns out, does not need you to have learned a single fact or formula or definition before even sitting down to take it. It is mostly just a series of shapes, of abstractions, of balls and diamonds and triangles that flash across a black screen for fractions of a second. And you got to react according to a set of instructions that were designed by a scientist who was watching me here in our studio this entire time behind the glass. So Brandon, Ali. Yes.

Hello. Hi. You're a neuroscientist?

Correct.

You're the man who just subjected me to whatever the fuck that was. And I apologize for cursing, although...

It'll make you curse.

No problem. I was going to say how unlike my experience is the sample of athletes? How many now that you've tested over however many years?

Yeah, we've tested about 40,000 athletes over the last nine years. And your response is on par.

There's a bit of... I don't want to make this all about me, but we need to at the top here because I experienced a bit of standardized test taking PTSD as I was becoming self-conscious about what my results were saying about me. And apologies for the sweat that I think pooled all over your hyperresponsive keypad.

Yeah. No, I totally understand that. And that is a unique aspect of what we do. We're in the science sphere. We're evaluating athletes for a variety of reasons, but obviously, test anxiety and getting that sense of, Okay, I'm not doing well here. And one of the things that our test is is trying to find what your cognitive capacity is on these things. We're pushing the limits. We're intentionally making- Felt like it. Yeah. We're trying to make you fail to find out what to do.

It felt like you were with me.

Well, we were, Pablo. Not far from it. I can understand that sense of failure. And when you think about elite athletes, they're not used to failing. So they don't know oftentimes how to deal with that. Now, obviously, we have on the other side of the spectrum, front office saying, if they can't handle this, then how are they going to handle a Sunday?

So of all of those people among the NFL class, who are the people who stick out to you as guys who just ace this thing?

Yeah, there are a number of players that I think that we can talk about simply because they've been in the media a lot. When you start thinking about your Josh Allens, your Brock Purdys, Patrick Moholm, Drew Burrows, Joe Burrows, those guys scored really, really well.

Like we're talking A-plus.

Yeah, above the 90th percentile. Yeah. Because somebody scored above the 90th percentile, does that mean they're going to be Patrick Mohomes or Drew Burrows? No, it doesn't. It just means they have the cognitive, wiring, and capacity to do that.

I want to get to how we got here with S2 as this instrument that is both incredibly valued by all sorts of people across the NFL and just prolifically shit on recently. Yeah. So let's anchor it in the present tense and the controversy. Let's teach the controversy, Brandon, right? Because the last draft has become, it feels like this crucible of public opinion for you guys. Number one overall is Bryce Young out of Alabama, a guy who is familiar with the S2 test, reportedly. He scores a 98, which is, as someone who just took this test, unfathomable. I am in awe of whoever can do that just on an objective level. But on the other end, we have C. J. Strauss, who scored, reportedly, an 18. In C. J. Straud, the S2 test was the reason, purportedly, that C. J. Straud was not taken number one overall. Right. And so how do you react to all of that?

Well, obviously, it's a numeracy thing. So when people were writing about us about Brock Purdy- Who aced the test as well. -who aced the test, and then last guy take in, and he's playing very well, JoshAll right, Josh Allen, Joe Burrow, all these people came up. They kept saying, Oh, we need more data. That's not real. But then when CJ takes it, so now we get shit on for one test.

Twitter is searching CJ Straud S2.

Yeah, it's not good for my mental health, right?

I imagine. Impulse control, hard to manage in.

That circumstance. Yeah. Look, CJ is a phenomenal quarterback. He reads defense very good. He's seemingly incredible. He's poised. He's super accurate. All of those things. But look, we are not allowed to talk about what CJ specifically scored. We're not allowed to talk about his effort on the test. It hurts us that the public can't look at all of our data. Yeah, it sucks. It sucks for me, for sure. But the people who use the product have access to all of that data. Those data are owned by the NFL consortium teams, and they have say on that. And there's not a chance in hell they would let us release scores. We've seen all of these stories. I certainly personally feel like there was leaks that were intentionally happened for a specific narrative.

Well, I should say that the way this all gets out is because this reporter, Bob McGinn, gets access seemingly to a trove of S2 test results, and S2 is the new wonderlick. And so this is now freighted with great meaning and various front offices, including, by the way, the Panthers front office and ownership. David Tepper, the owner of the team, seems to be an analytics guy, put stock into S2. All of this stuff seems to be a way of decoding the intelligence and the likelihood of success as these various teams see it in these players. And your response to just the tests that were leaked just because I want to get it on the record here is what? Because the 18 is like, that's a thing you guys are going to wear.

Seemingly for all time. We won't hear about it forever. And that's part of being in pro sports. Look, it's a tough business. Undoubtably, every year, something negative comes out behind the draft. We just happen to be on it this year. Again, a low score doesn't mean you can't play. It doesn't mean you're not going to make it. A high score doesn't mean you're going to be an All-Pro quarterback. We're more interested in how to CJ, how to, Bryce, process information. Nobody has a crystal ball.

But it is worth pointing out here that what Brandon and S2 are selling is the closest thing currently to a crystal ball on the matter of a player's brainpower. What they specifically claim, using their own proprietary sample and analysis, is that a quarterback's Wonderlick score, for instance, accounts for less than 0.1 % of an NFL quarterback's eventual career pass rating. But a quarterback's S2 score, that explains or predicts roughly 30 % of that same NFL career passer rating. It's a thing which raised the eyebrows of my most statistically fluid friends, just as a matter of magnitude, when I explain this to them. Because what you should know here is simply that 30 % is fucking enormous.

If you think there is an NFL team out there drafting a player based on S2 alone, you don't know sports, you don't know football. That is just not ever going to happen. Now, if there was some narrative built out there that, hey, we're going to take this player because he scored 98, or we're not going to take this player because he scored 18, I think people are happy to use S2 as a scapegoat rather than saying, Oh, we could potentially be making a mistake. There's no team out there that is drafting off of S2. S2 is one piece of the puzzle. You've got to put it in context of this kid's play speed, position. Let's take a guy like Miles Garrett, fastest defensive endeavor. Now, Miles did great on the S2, but let's say he didn't. As a defensive end, if you can run over somebody around somebody to get to the quarterback, it doesn't matter how many fucking objects you can track. Am I right?

I was going to make this point.

Absolutely. It's just one piece of the puzzle that management is using to help reduce uncertainty when you start thinking about, Okay, how does he make decisions? So if it's a receiver that can run 4-2, and we've had that, can we handicap that 4-2? So if he's slow on the decision making, maybe he plays like a 4-4 or 4-5 guy. That's helpful. Not saying, okay, well, he scored a low on the S2, we're not going to take him.

But let me ask it this way because I now like to imagine you watching football on Sunday. And if I'm you, I'll put it that way because I don't want to assume you're cognitive wiring. I am rooting for the guys who aced this test to be awesome, and I'm rooting for the guys who bombed this test to be terrible.

That is an interesting way to think about it. I think if I was concerned with Johnny in Columbus, Ohio, who is a CJ Straud fan, and that's who I was trying to impress or that's who I was trying to work for, I could see that. The teams that we work with across all sports, that's not the way they use the tool. They're not going to call me tomorrow and say, You know what? Cj had five touchdowns and 500 yards yesterday.

We're ending this contract.

Yeah. That's not the reality of it. We have a lot of dialog around players about how they're best going to be utilized, what situations are going to do well, and what situations are going to struggle in. It's not, Should we take CJ? Should we take Bryce? Honestly, and that's the part of this whole thing was like, when people started shitting on us, they act like we said something. First off, we said nothing.

At all. With the leaks.

Yeah. I hope to God, CJ tears it up. We love that. As a matter of fact, that is what drives a scientist. The 98s crushing it? No shit. The 30s crushing it? We can learn something from that. We can learn something from that athlete. What makes him special? Is it that his coordinators are really good at programming around him? Is it that this dude can overcome? Or is it, as you experience today, if you mailed it in and gave 80 % effort today, what do you think your score would have been?

Let's just say on the effort level, I maxed out. Yeah. And I was struggling to get my head above.

Water, man. I'm not going to comment on CJ's effort because I wasn't there.

But I.

Should add here that a source told us here at Paublea Torey finds out that CJ Strowd's score was flagged with the words questionable data in real big letters on the top of his S2 results. And apparently, about 10-20 players get flagged like this on average every year, sometimes because they just didn't try or didn't care or were too tired to do either.

And.

We did, of course, reach out to CJ Strowd for an interview to clarify all of this and more. But a Texan's official wrote us this quote, We / he are moving past the S2 test, and we're not looking to give it any more life. That story and test are far in the past for CJ. End quote. Which just means that the best we have at the moment in terms of self-scouting from CJ Stroud is what he told assembled reporters back in April of this year.

I'm not a test tech, so I play football. The people who are making the picks know what I can do. So that's why that matters to me. There's a whole bunch of people who know how to coach better, know how to play quarterback better, know how to do everything on social media. But a man in the arena, that's what's tough, is stepping in an arena of 10th folks. And I'm standing on that. I want.

To voice that skepticism from my NFL expert friends who when I DM them and I'm saying, This S2 thing, what do you think? My smartest friends, what they say is, This is not the same as bullets flying on a field. This is not actually... I suppose until further notice, a gaming laptop with shapes moving around cannot possibly replicate what it is to be out there on a.

Football field. It cannot. Let me take your argument a step further because we work with Special Forces and we work with law enforcement.

Literally bullets fly.

Yeah. Impulse control for a quarterback, you throw a pick, yeah, it's costly. It sucks. Impulse control for a cop who can't control the impulse to pull the trigger when somebody pulled out a cell phone is life-changing. Again, we're doing our best. We're taking the best tools in the cognitive sciences to measure that impulse control system. Can I predict how an officer will operate when he feels like his life is in danger? I cannot. I would be the first to admit I cannot. What can I do? Can you give me a really good proxy for whether we feel like his brain is capable of doing it? That's what we're doing. We're not telling you, C. J. Strauss is going to go out and suck. C. J. Strauss is going to go out and throw for 500 yards and five touchdowns against the box. That's not our job.

But what you are saying is that given this range of outcomes based on our archive, our database of thousands upon thousands of examples, here is what the probability is looking like. If you score X, what will happen to you in the NFL? Right.

And again, as we've talked about with a lot of variables, a guy's got to be locked in. He's got to give his full effort. He's got to give his shit about this test. If the 18 for CJ is legitimate, he is proving a lot of people wrong, including us, about whether our test measures exactly what we can do. What I will say is that he is beating the probabilities, not proving us wrong.

And so if there is anything that the CJ Strat experience has taught you, what is it?

I think that CJ has taught us that there are probably many players that have overcome limitations, whatever they may be, to be highly successful. There are a lot of ways that one can be successful in the NFL, and it's not reliant on one thing like arm talent or decision making or S2 or whatever it is. There are a lot of ways to be successful, and you need a lot of tools to be successful. I think that, again, maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot here, but we've been trying to predict human behavior since the beginning of time. It turns out we're really.

Bad at it. I was going to point out, Brandon, my general rule of thumb when it comes to the NFL draft or a draft in any pro sport is that nobody really fucking knows anything.

It's hard. It's hard. I mean, the bust rate in the first round alone is like almost 50 %. So again, if you're going to knock us for being wrong even 20 % of the time, we're still all right. We're still helping make informed decisions.

All right. So give me the truth, Brandon.

You actually did very well on the S2 test.

I just want to tell Dominique Foxworth, one of my best friends in the world, former NFL cornerback, to go fuck yourself.

Now, let's talk about this in reality. Yes, please. I'll just go down by each one and we'll go over your score. Perception speed.

All right, performance test. It's never good when you're like, is the right answer to 10 questions in a row A?

You're.

At the 34th %.

Yeah, that was horrifying to me.

Which these are also age-dependent. So your ability to search through visual chaos and locate a target.

I saw what I meant to press it. The moving fast, man. All right. Sometimes I'm pressing it, and then I see it right as I press it, and I'm like, Oh, that was a pick.

You're at the 41st percentile. Okay. Your ability to broaden your attention and track many moving objects.

All the balls are moving. I have to follow the balls that have been highlighted. This is like watching three-card Monte. Man, I'm going to be terrible at this. Yep, way off. Very good. There's so many balls.

Fifteenth.

Percentile. That felt like I should be in a home somewhere. Like doing that test. I was like, Oh, yeah, don't let me out in public.

It's not easy. No. Yep, your instinctive learning.

What the fuck.

Does that mean? Oh, this is the we're taking drugs and hallucinating stuff part of the test. I've been waiting for this. What feels like someone on LSD. I see what's happening. No, I don't see what's happening. Oh, I'm terrible at this. Motherfucking. Is somebody who thrives on positive validation that was existential, disturbing.

You were at the third percentile. Struggled a little bit. Third? Third percentile. Struggled a little bit with third. We scored you compared to NFL players. Thank you. This is not scored to the general population. So your worst area performance is what we call instinctive learning. Okay? And that is your ability to pick up on probabilities. So if somebody lined up in a formation and they did the same thing every time they lined up in that formation, life would be easy. But let's say they only run a certain play 70 % of the time out of that... The time is the transformation. And 30 % of the time, it's a different play. Over time, we can pick that up. Guys like Drew Breys was the best that we've ever tested, honestly, over the 40,000 athletes at this skill. How about the other one? What else, please? Decision complexity? Yeah. 68 percentile. Okay. So very good at executing the rules. Once you know the rules, so once you know, I need to go opposite or I need to go same, you're able to.

Execute that really quickly. It tracks with my particular childhood complex, psychologically, but yeah.

Impulse control, 76 %. Hell, yeah. Yeah. Distraction control, 71 %. All right. And your ability to improvise, 74th %.

Now, those are encouraging numbers. I should out that in my household, the 74 is an F, but relative to the scale of NFL players.

That is almost at the elite level. Yeah.

And.

Then we actually have a secondary measure. So this is just how you're wired as a human being. When you're forced to make a decision within less than half a second. So four of our tasks, you are forced to respond in less than half a second. Are you wired for speed? Are you wired for accuracy? I want you to go ahead and guess, Pablo, because you did have a failure in one of those, and were forced to.

Redo- I was forced to redo the practice test.

Because why?

Because I was taking too long. Yes. I'm going to say, again, true to my personal psychological insecurities that I'm an accuracy man.

You are way wired for.

Accuracy over speed. As a journalist, as a fact checker, I believe that this is a virtue. So could you give me, this is where the guy who took the LSAT twice and then almost became a lawyer and guy who studied his ass off for the SAT wants to know, give me the scores. If you can give me just per category what my.

Results are. Yeah, for sure. So your overall score was at the 40th percentile, which is average. Okay, very- We can't forget that aspect. Average is between the 40th and 60th percentile. We're not a typical IQ test, so we don't have a bell-shaped distribution. It's an even distribution here. The same amount of people score a two as a 98 and as a 50. You were in the average range. So if you ever heard, and this is again, just the one overall score, so-and-so scored a 50. That is dead average for an NFL player. So yeah, that's your S2 profile.

I'm going to go home, unilaterally, and just tell everybody that I outscored CJ Strowd on the most prominent cognitive processing intelligence test in professional sports. And to that, you say what?

I would say that's a very dangerous thinking process to get yourself into, because to be C. J. Strowd, you're going to need a whole lot more than an S. Two score. You're going to need a little bit of height, a little bit of size, some arm talent. I have 10 and three quarters. I got going. It's not bad. I did notice you had some pretty thick soles on.

Okay. A lug sole is a fashion choice. It is a fashion choice. Brandon?

Yeah. No, I like the fashion.

Yeah. Very fashionable. Touche.

But you're saying there's a chance.

I'm saying, Pablo, if flag football is in the 2028 Olympics, you might be a guy I'm giving a call here relatively soon.

Yeah. If anybody needs a non-instinctual moron, I am apparently eminently qualified. I'm sitting here at my keyboard now, having found out that CJ Strowd and I are not so different. No, not because we both got blown out by Bryce Young on the S2 test, but because I personally bombed the ALSAT in real life the first time I took it, because I, of course, wanted to go to law school. But instead, what happened because of that test is that I wound up pursuing my very first job in sports media at Sports illustrated, which changed my whole entire life, which is all to say? Fuck standardized tests. Sometimes. Because sometimes, the test you fail, winds up becoming one of the greatest things that ever happened to you. Whether you consider yourself a test taker or not. This has been Pablo Torrey Finds Out, a Meta Lark Media production. I'll talk to you next time.