A paper published this month in the American Journal of Applied Psychology found that there's a correlation between a player's Wonderlic score and his likelihood of being arrested during his time in the NFL.
"The effects are relatively small," author Brian Hoffman, a professor at Georgia, told ESPN. "But it's important here because when making multimillion-dollar decisions, a small effect can be very meaningful. A player's getting a four-game suspension can be a big deal, competitively and financially."
http://espn.go.com/blog/nflnation/post/_/id/201565/using-data-to-predict-arrest-rates-of-nfl-draft-picks
A lot of common sense type stuff but you wonder if data such as this will lead to at least some teams altering their draft strategy at least a bit and putting more emphasis on Wonderlic scores.
The study also found that a player who was arrested before the draft is almost twice as likely to be arrested during his NFL career as a player who had not been arrested before the draft. That makes sense, and it's no surprise that many teams will move a player down or off their draft boards if he's arrested.
"If I were a decision-maker, I wouldn't view getting into trouble as a zero-sum game," Hoffman said. "You check off that they've been in trouble and know what that has meant for others on a percentage basis. And then there's a factor that would make the likelihood a little worse: If they score lower on the Wonderlic. Really, that tells you there's even more work to do there."
For that period, they found a mean grade of 21.7 on a scale of 1 to 50. Approximately 18 percent of the players who scored below the mean were arrested in the NFL, while 9.5 percent of those who scored above it were arrested.
