The closer you are to the ball, the higher your score on the Wonderlic IQ test. Ben Fry decided to illustrate this:
Wonderlic himself says that basically, the scores decrease as you move further away from the ball, which is interesting but unsurprising. It’s sort of obvious that a quarterback needs to be on the smarter side, but I was curious to see what this actually looked like. Using this table as a guide, I then grabbed this diagram from Wikipedia showing a typical formation in a football game. I cleaned up the design of the diagram a bit and replaced the positions with their scores….To make the diagram a bit clearer, I scaled each position based on its score….With the proportion, I no longer need the numbers, so I’ve switched back to using the initials for each position’s title:
I’m odd enough that this was one of my first questions:
Don’t tell Tufte that I’ve used the radius, not the proportional area, of the circle as the value for each ellipse! A cardinal sin that I’m using in this case to improve proportion and clarify a point.
(Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok.)