Matt Waldman’s RSP examines the talent versus work ethic question as it applies to football and the NFL Draft. 

What is the nature of talent?

How much of it is inherent? How much of it comes from persistent training?

Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-Hour Rule in his publication Outliers is a popular and hotly debated idea.

I agree with Gladwell’s essential point that it takes dedicated and well-crafted training to become good at something. However, it would be simplistic to state that there’s no such thing as inherent talent.

According to Gladwell, Mozart was composing “garbage” at 11 and didn’t create something great until his early 20s. Even so, an adult in his early 20s composing great music is still unusual.

I wonder if attributing an artistic level of master solely to 10 years or 10,000 hours of time spent on a topic diminishes the value of an individual’s ability to assimilate what he knows about the world and himself into a higher artistic expression that logging a specific volume of time may not account for. That skill of assimilating stimuli from the world around you is also a talent — whether it’s inherent or a part of accumulating hours of practice remains the root question.

We debate this question in football. A month ago, I debated Mike Renner, a writer at Pro Football Focus about the nature of the running back position.  Mike argues that running back is an intuitive position of inherent talent. I argue that what he, and others, think as inherent are a series of learned behaviors.

@PFF_Mike

Your argument is rooted in ideas from 50-70 years ago–and they were wrong then, too.

Aside from the craft of blocking and receiving, the skill of running requires knowledge and development of several types of skills.

Let's walk you though a list… https://t.co/6cG8ChR02h

— Matt Waldman (@MattWaldman) October 23, 2018

Vision is a learned skill.
1. Understanding a variety of blocking schemes.
2. The timing that goes with those schemes.
3. The judgment when and when not to deviate from scheme based on game situations.

Some talents bring a small amount of inherent skill, but not a ton. https://t.co/6cG8ChR02h

— Matt Waldman (@MattWaldman) October 23, 2018

Footwork is a learned skill.

1. jump cuts, slalom cuts, 90-degree cuts, speed cuts, step-over cuts.
2. Which foot to use to cut in a given situation.
3. The mechanics of good footwork.
4. Understanding step length factors.
5. Integration of these skills to blocking scheme https://t.co/6cG8ChR02h

— Matt Waldman (@MattWaldman) October 23, 2018

Running with balance and power:

-Learning to run from a squatted position between the tackles.

-Using the head correctly to align the body and generate power.

-Use of the arms to absorb contact and prevent the defender from reshaping your alignment on contact. https://t.co/6cG8ChR02h

— Matt Waldman (@MattWaldman) October 23, 2018

The RB position, when played well, requires a wide variety of skills to be a complete player. It's on par with any position other than QB.

Your argument is akin to saying you just need to swing fast, hit hard, and have stamina to be a good boxer. https://t.co/6cG8ChR02h

— Matt Waldman (@MattWaldman) October 23, 2018

We can get into knee height, pacing, maximizing sudden turns, and ball security as well before even broaching receiving and blocking.

Your own @JuMosq makes a good argument for DE being less skilled. https://t.co/6cG8ChR02h

— Matt Waldman (@MattWaldman) October 23, 2018

As with every position in pro football, there is a physical baseline to perform the role effectively. However, that baseline is lower than people presume and they often place too much emphasis on the wrong skills. They also discount that, like boxing or a martial art like jiu-jitsu, there is a heavier intellectual component than credited.

While not on the level of jiu-jitsu, the chess of martial arts, running backs must learn a variety of intellectual and physical skills and there is a diversity of archetypes at the position with various combinations of skills that deliver production. This leads us back to a discussion about the weight of inherent talent versus developed talent through work.

World-renowned trainer Firas Zahabi discusses this in this podcast below. Essentially, Zahabi believes that the greater the number rules in an endeavor, the more room there is for talented that’s acquired through persistent work. In contrast, the fewer rules in the endeavor (think weightlifting, sprinting, or throwing a javelin), the more inherent talent plays a role.

Apply this to football and it underscores the idea that the NFL Combine is a good exercise for testing athletic baselines but bigger, stronger, faster, and quicker is not the recipe for better. It’s where a lot of teams go wrong and then reinforce these biases with how it divides practice reps and unintentionally grades performance based on draft capital.

Football is a craft, not a product off an assembly line. There’s value in examining process with data but taking a strict, manufacturing-based approach starves an organization of its potential to develop an understanding and appreciation of craft that’s rooted in a holistic view of each position.

The best talents in football often have great physical talent but on top of that, they are most often the best decision-makers before the snap, immediately after the snap, and in the present moment. They rely on technique and the ability to combine a variety of technically-learned movements to do their job.

Players with sustainable production and long careers who aren’t the best often lack great physical talent relative to their peer group but possess a higher degree of learned skills. Rarely do we see long-term starters (who do more than one thing well) lean mostly on great physical talent while lacking a refined level of skill. This should tell you immediately that many positions in football are as much (if not more) intellectual, technical, and craft-like in nature than purely physical.

These arguments may be right but they won’t be proven as such as long as the NFL still takes a wholesale approach toward evaluation with an overemphasis on bigger, stronger, faster and reinforces it with draft capital bias. Still, if you are evaluating talent as opposed to guessing how the NFL will evaluate talent, this is the path you must consider if you want to see beyond the back-end of a herd.

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