ST. LOUIS, Mo. Greg Robinson of the St. Louis Rams didn’t realize something was missing from his life until he opened up this morning’s New York Times.
HUGE Alvin Ailey fans.
“I was looking for the review of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company’s upcoming season when I noticed something in the sports pages,” said the 332-pound tackle. “All of a sudden it hit me–I should have been playing football,” he says as he fires up a homemade particle accelerator he uses to make zucchini fritattas with the heat generated by collisions between quarks and gluons.
The Rams are the NFL’s smartest team based on their collective performance on the Wonderlic Personnel Test, a standardized exam given at the NFL Scouting Combine to college football players who hope to make the pros. Despite that surfeit of grey matter, the team hasn’t made the playoffs since 2005.
“Dante–Ezra Pound–Canto I, Canto II–hut!”
The Wonderlic exam includes questions such as: “Rope is selling for $.10 a foot, and Bob is on a train traveling 60 miles an hour from Kansas City to St. Louis. You should be in: (a) a seven-man front, (b) a nickel defense with a Cover 2, or (c) a basic 4-3 alignment with RE and RT stunting.”
Rams’ coach Jeff Fisher says the team’s IQ sometimes gets in the way of its performance on the field. “I told the guys to suck it up in training camp, we had a shot at a wildcard spot,” he said with disgust, “but no, they’d rather play chess and conjugate irregular French verbs.”
Cuthbertson’s Irregular French Verb Wheel: I have one you can borrow.
“Don’t blame me,” said running back Chase Reynolds as he looked up over a paperback copy of Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones. “Our playbook is bo-ring.”
Borges: “The wind from the east is weak–we’ll receive!”
Among the teams with lesser intellectual gifts who made the playoffs were the AFC West division champion Denver Broncos. The Broncos’ coaching staff credits a top-to-bottom overhaul of the team’s learning environment.
“The guys were listening to ‘Hooked on Phonics’ and Beethoven’s late quartets in the locker room,” says Joe Bob Dunham, place-kick holders coach. “We bought some heavy metal and alternated it with rap and Jessica Simpson, and I guess you’d have to say it worked.” The Broncos are the number one seed in the AFC and hope veteran quarterback Peyton Manning will lead them to victory over wild-card winner Pittsburgh next Sunday, despite doubts about the ubiquitous TV pitchman’s knowledge of phenomenology. “You don’t become a unanimous first team All-Pro pick like him if you’re MENSA material,” notes Cooter, referring to the high-IQ membership organization.
Fisher says the problem with this year’s St. Louis squad is common among intellectuals. “They’re like a bunch of absent-minded professors,” he notes. “They know which sonnet of Shakespeare has the ‘bare ruined choirs’ line in it, but they can’t remember where they put their car keys.”
Robinson: “‘Bare ruined choirs’ is Sonnet 73, line 4, left side.”
But Robinson was unapologetic. “Scientists are on the verge of incredible breakthroughs in nanotechnology, and all we ever talk about in team meetings is blitz packages,” he said, and he blames the Rams’ coaching staff for the team’s poor performance this year. “I told coach Fisher to put ‘Make playoffs’ on his to-do list, but he went and stuck it in a copy of a stupid Danielle Steel novel. Once you drop that in the library book return, some other knucklehead will check it out and you’ll never see it again.”
The Rams’ may de-emphasize their reliance on the Wonderlic test next season and draft players based on athletic rather than cognitive skills, according to Fisher. “Kurt Warner is the kinda player we need,” he said, referring to the team’s quarterback during its “Greatest Show on Turf” years. “Kurt’s a snake-handling religious nut who used to tell reporters God made him throw for 300 yards, three touchdowns and no picks. He wasn’t the brightest bulb on the scoreboard, but he got us to the Super Bowl twice.”
A slightly different version of this article first appeared in Flak Magazine in 2007. It will continue to appear annually, mutatis mutandis as the lawyers say, until the Rams make the playoffs.
I guess brains over braun doesn’t always happen?