For decades, the NFL has used intelligence tests and psychological tests to evaluate draft prospects, and for decades some players have felt those tests are overly invasive. This year, the NFL stopped implementing the Wonderlic test, although individual teams can still give it to prospects.
The Giants, however, were famous -- or infamous -- for many years for giving prospects a very lengthy psychological profile, asking college players to sit down for hours to be evaluated. Many players didn’t like it, but most felt that they couldn’t say anything, because they were eager to get drafted and didn’t want to alienate any team that might pick them.
Keyshawn Johnson, the first overall pick in the 1996 NFL draft, said on his radio show this morning that the Giants, who owned the fifth overall pick that year, asked him to sit down for hours to do a psychological evaluation.
“The Giants, Jeremiah Davis [a longtime scout for the team], was the head guy at the time in the scouting department. He said, ‘Keyshawn, we’re thinking about taking you at 5. . . . But you have to take this psychological evaluation test that we give to all our prospective draftees,’” Johnson said.
When Johnson asked Davis how long the test would take, Davis said a couple hours, and Johnson told him he didn’t want to devote that much time to a psychological evaluation.
“He said, ‘You have to do it or else we have to take you off our board, which means we will not draft you at 5 and you may fall,’” Johnson recalled. “I said, I ain’t gonna do it. Go ahead and take me off your board.”
Johnson could do that because he had been in close contact with both the Jets at No. 1 and the Jaguars at No. 2, and he was sure that he would be off the board before the Giants picked at No. 5. Other draft prospects weren’t of Johnson’s caliber, however, and had to sit for the Giants’ test.
And Johnson wasn’t the only one: Deion Sanders told a similar story about the Giants wanting him to take the test in 1989. Sanders went fifth overall and the Giants had the 18th pick, and Sanders was also confident enough that the Giants weren’t drafting him that he didn’t feel the need to sit down for two hours and take their test.
George Young, the longtime General Manager of the Giants, was the driving force behind the Giants’ psychological test. When coach Dan Reeves left the Giants at the end of the 1996 season, he blamed Young’s test for many of the team’s personnel failures, saying that he fundamentally disagreed with Young wasting everyone’s time with such a long exam when there was so much more important information that could be gleaned from simply watching the player’s college tape.
“My contention is that a young man in college who goes to a Combine and has to go through all kinds of tests in the Combine and then you ask him to sit down and take a two-hour test, he’s not that excited,” Reeves said. “So how valid is a two-hour test?”
Johnson didn’t think it was valid at all. Neither did Sanders. And they had every right to blanche at the Giants’ request. Unfortunately, most players sat through the test because they felt they had no choice.
