* None of this indicates that it’s nurture. People with good work ethics and the drive to be successful in any field are generally going to have good genetics, which means they will come from relatively wealthy two-parent homes.
A lot of times, nature and nurture are conflated. That’s why you need to rely on behavioral genetics for your priors before interpreting this kind of data.
To be the best at something requires an innate desire to master it, and I’m really doubtful that parents can instill that given all the research that shows parenting has no effect of anything (see Jayman blog at the side of your screen). Football practice takes a lot of time and energy, and if your 6 foot tall, 180 pound son doesn’t want to do it, he’s not going to.
* If being drafted into the NFL as a QB were not highly dependent on nurture, why would football practice require so much effort?
Steve’s point, I take it, isn’t that being 6 foot 5, strong, with a great arm and a quick mind, isn’t genetic, or that it doesn’t help you get drafted. The point is that, as people compete more and more to develop the particular skills needed for QB, nature will begin to recede in relative importance compared to nurture.
* “Practice” does not mean “nurture.” Your work ethic is genetic, as are your tastes. If environment matters, it’s that kids want to be quarterback to get chicks and be the coolest guy in school, not because of anything their dad did.
Evolution tells us you seek status outside the home, not try to impress the people you live with.
* So Malcolm Gladwell is right – 20,000 hours of practice turns anyone who performs the practice into an expert? – even if quarterback aspirants are short in height and have small mitts?
I don’t think “nurtured” is the right word here. The right words are two: selected for physical requirements and groomed.
And are the quarterback parents “tiger” parents for their intensive grooming of their sons to become proficient quarterbacks?
* I think it’s hard for sports fans — indeed for most of us — to keep in mind just how outrageously talented pro athletes such as NFL quarterbacks really are. They are the standouts who have been selected from an already-elite group of standouts (college QBs) who have been selected from a group of standouts (high school QBs) who were usually so obviously the best players on the field that even the school librarian could pick them out.
In this sense, the ‘nurture’ of an athletically-average boy, no matter how intensive, is going to fall so far short of him being an NFL QB that it’s not even laughable. It just doesn’t happen.
One reasons the position of NFL QB is so endlessly fascinating, I think, is that it’s so incredibly difficult to excel that even armchair QBs like us can see at a glance when a spectacularly-talented actual NFL QB is deficient: missed passes, misreadings of coverage schemes, getting panicky in a disintegrating pocket and throwing a pick — there’s just so much that can go wrong that it’s easy for even casual fans to pile on joyfully in dissecting a ‘poor’ QB’s performance.
* I don’t think you quite grasp the nature of quarterbacking. Minute technical details in footwork and throwing form are huge. That is what the specialized instruction provides. A critique from an expert.
And once you get that knowledge/advice, everything snowballs. Your own practice (with dad) becomes more fruitful. You get the starting job, so more attention from team coaches, reps in practice, and game time experience.
The other skill set essential for a QB is mental. Reading the defense pre-snap, quick decision-making, and anticipation. These aspects seem like they might be tougher to teach, but getting repetition has to help. The 7 v 7 leagues or camps, played in over summers, are basically all passing. The lack of lineman reduces the fog of war providing opportunity to “put it all together”.
* Coaching makes a big difference:
* Kickers and punters are more extreme cases of this phenomenon. There was an article maybe 2-3 years ago that analyzed how recruiting high school kickers/punters to colleges works and the gist was that the top kids have parents who send them to expensive kicking coaches and camps that get them on the radar with scouts for college programs. In an interview with a head coach (who was made to seem representative), he admitted to having no idea how to evaluate kickers and punters, so all of that work was outsourced to professional camps and the kicking gurus who run them. I don’t recall a discussion of relative affluence among the recruits, but it would seem reasonable to expect it to be pretty high. My biggest takeaway from the article was that if I ever have a son my goal is going to be for him to kick for a team like Vanderbilt or Northwestern so that I won’t have to pay his tuition.
* I’ve noticed that blacks dominate free school-based sports that have a strong development system that requires little to no involvement from the parents. The ethnic background of a black athlete’s mother seems to be a major factor in whether or not they will be successful in a sport that requires heavy parental involvement.
Major League Baseball is about 8 percent non-Hispanic black and 2015 was considered a good draft year for blacks. Five of the top nine black players drafted had a non-black mother.
On Wikipedia’s list of black NHL players, about 80 percent of players with an identified ethnicity are bi-racial, the other 20 percent are mostly Caribbean. There is even a Nigerian. Seth Jones, son of NBA’s Popeye Jones, has a white mother.
In regards to outlying black quarterbacks in the story, Jacoby Brissett had Bill Parcells as a mentor. Cardale Jones caught the eye of the high school coach at age 8, had a guardian, and after graduating high school attended Fork Union Military Academy to become academically eligible for college, on scholarship I assume. Coincidentally, Christian Hackenberg, who had involved parents, spent his four years of high school at Fork Union.
* If you listen to the “Move the Sticks” podcast with Daniel Jeremiah and Bucky Brooks, frequent guest coach Brian Billick notes that there are not 32 men on the earth with the talent to play NFL QB. And that size and arm strength while important are not the determining factors (though hosts Jeremiah and Brooks, long time scouts, disagree).
Billick has argued at length past season in multiple appearances that the mental ability to read and pick apart a stout defense under pressure with “enough” arm strength and accuracy are the most important attributes for a QB. Not size and strength. The late Bill Walsh once ran a coaching session with Phil Simms. Simms relates that he was trying to impress Walsh by putting mustard on the ball, and Walsh irately told him to soften the throw, so that the receiver could catch it easily, but put it in a box that meant that only the receiver, and not any defender, could catch it.
Every team would like an Andrew Luck as QB. But the Saints won a Superbowl with a short QB, as did the Seahawks, as did the Montana led 49ers, and Favre led Packers. Heck Peyton Manning was not exactly mobile but managed the game enough to beat all-Universe Cam Newton’s superior arm and mobility (but inferior reads and pass rush management).
Even in the NFL, shortage of talent at the larger heights will allow the Wilsons and Brees to compete. Billick is right — look at last year’s roster and see how many low performing QBs there were, despite having all the right “tools.”
