I'm just surprised football players are above the national average. I guess potential isn't everything.
As someone who played on top 25 amateur teams and then 1 year of college sports I’ll tell you that athletes need to have above average IQ. The ones who are dumb fuck up plays and roles and mess the whole flow up. Unless someone is hyper-athletic, being dumb won’t cut it at the highest levels.
I know there's a stereotype about sports players being idiots, but it makes sense. IQ measures the ability to recognise patterns and react quickly to emerging circumstances. It's not hard to see how that would help with team sports.
Perhaps at the highest levels of anything you would find higher IQs. I really don't know. Usually, stereotypes are based on reality, and my own experience has lived up to the stereotype (with exceptions, of course). Like I say, innate ability isn't everything. In college, the football players had it twice as hard as most everyone else, because they had a full time job playing football and had to to go to school.
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