I enjoyed the performance of Richard Sherman on Sunday after the game. I enjoy his trash talking. He entertains me. I respect that he went to Stanford. I don’t think the guy is ignorant. But if you are going to talk smack on TV after a game, you better be prepared for smack to be spoken back at you. Richard Sherman sounded like a thug on Sunday, which is just how football players should sound. They should be scary guys. They have a scary job.
Sherman’s 1400/990 on the SATs is below the average test taker score, normed at 1000 in 2006. And it is nearly 3 standard deviations below the average Stanford SAT of 2215, new style.
What about graduating second in his class in high school? Sherman attended Dominguez High School in Compton, which is 13% black, 83% Hispanic, 1% Asian, and 0.1% white. A grand total of 6.3 % of students are proficient in Math and 27.5% are proficient in English. Being valedictorian or salutatorian in these circumstances may mean painfully little.
Elite schools like Stanford do not take average students. According to CollegeConfidential.com, in 2005, Stanford accepted less than 1% of students who had below a 500 on Reading and just 1% had below a 500 on Math. (I could not find the statistics for the combined score for 2005, and the next year the SATs changed their scoring system. However, it is a fair assumption that the students who managed to get in with below a 500 math score likely did much better on verbal, and vice versa. Thus even with affirmative action, there’s no way Stanford would have accepted Sherman, but for his football abilities.)
However, the NFL has all incoming players take the Wonderlic test, which is a very accurate proxy for IQ. Sherman scored a 24, which is equivalent to a 108 IQ. That’s a standard deviation and a half higher than your average black, and smarter than your average white American.
But it’s lower than the average for the predominantly white positions of center, quarterback, and lineman. It’s far below Peyton Manning’s 28 (116 IQ), Tom Brady’s 33 (126 IQ), or Eli Manning’s 38.5 (137 IQ).
More importantly, it’s below the 115 IQ that, just a few decades ago, was viewed as necessary to attend college—much less an elite university like Stanford.
So Richard Sherman is no doofus. But he’s not as exceptional as he’s made out to be.
