Lessons in humility

There's an old Mac Davis song with a rather interesting title, "It's hard to be humble" with an even more interesting first line, "Oh Lord it's hard to be humble, when you're perfect in every way."  Unfortunately, Mr. Davis provides a very good example of hubris, not humility.  As I have stated before (on numerous occasions), humility is an important and indispensable characteristic to leadership.  I will agree with Mr. Davis on one point though, humility can be difficult.

I bring up the topic of humility today in response to a superb article written by David Leonhardt in today's New York Times, "The Power of Humility".  Leonhardt's article is timed perfectly with tonight's NFL Draft, and he opens his article with, "Tonight at the Caesars Forum Conference Center near Las Vegas, thousands of people will gather for an annual demonstration of human overconfidence."  Wow - what gives?  He goes on, "I recognize that many readers of this newsletter are not football fans.  Still, I think the draft is worth a few minutes of your attention, because it turns out to be a delightful case study of human hubris, one with lessons for other subjects, like the economy and COVID-19."  Okay, now you have my attention Mr. Leonhardt!

Fundamentally, the NFL Draft is no different than what most employers do nearly every day - recruiting and choosing which job candidates to hire for an open position.  What is different about the NFL Draft is that the employers (in this case, the team owners, general managers, and coaching staffs) have more information about each prospective candidate than any other employer.  College football players entering the draft are subject to an intensive process which is far beyond what most employers do.  An individual player's performance is judged on the field by thoroughly reviewing game films from their college careers.  They are run through a battery of physical and mental tests (you can test yourself with what the NFL teams use - the Wonderlic test - here) at an event known as the NFL Combine.  They are interviewed by coaches and general managers.

Despite having all of this knowledge, NFL teams notoriously fail when it comes to making the right choice.  Just take a look at the following chart from Leonhardt's article today, showing the top quarterbacks that were selected in the Draft (including the #1 overall pick, Heisman Trophy winner Baker Mayfield):

As you can see, if teams had the opportunity to repeat the 2018 NFL Draft, Josh Allen would likely have been the first quarterback taken.  As a matter of fact, Josh Rosen, Sam Darnold, and Baker Mayfield will likely sit on the bench this year.  Imagine spending all of that money on a bust!  Unfortunately, teams more often than not fail to make the right pick.  Most of the best quarterbacks in the NFL right now were actually drafter after other quarterbacks who haven't performed as well.  And then there is the example of Tom Brady (likely the greatest NFL quarterback of all time), who was selected by the New England Patriots with the 199th pick of the 2000 NFL Draft.

Leonhardt references one of his earlier articles in the Times (this one written on the morning of the 2020 NFL Draft), which referenced a study by the economists Cade Massey and Richard Thaler (incidentally, Thaler won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017).  Massey and Thaler studied the NFL Draft and analyzed a player's performance with where they were selected in the draft.  They found that teams were notoriously bad at selecting players.  They found that the chance that a player at a given position (e.g. quarterback, wide receiver, or offensive lineman) turned out to be better than another player at the same position drafted next was only 52% (basically a coin toss, or better yet, dart-throwing monkeys).

Massey said, "Even the smartest guys in the world, the guys who spend hours with game film, can't predict this with much success.  There's no crime in that.  The crime is thinking you can predict it."  Take for example the New York Jets (a team that hasn't been to the Super Bowl since Joe Namath played in Super Bowl III in 1969).  They traded away four of their draft picks in the 2018 NFL Draft in order to move  up only three spots to the sixth pick.  Who did they select with that pick?  Quarterback Sam Darnold, who as you can see in the figure above, has simply not been worth it (he's not even playing for the Jets anymore).  

As Leonhardt points out, the NFL Draft provides us with a lesson in humility and hubris.  Experts simply cannot predict an individual player's performance as well as they think.  As it turns out, what is true for football experts is true for most experts in many other fields.  We do not predict as well as we think, whether the prediction involves what the stock market will do, who will win the next presidential election, or even what will happen during a global pandemic.  Leonhardt writes, "The world is frequently messier and harder to understand than people acknowledge. We tell ourselves artificially tidy stories about why something happened and what will happen next."

If NFL teams can't accurately predict a player's future job performance, even with the mountain of information that they possess on each player, how do you expect employers in other industries will fare with picking top talent?  As it turns out, we are not as good as we think either.  And that is probably okay, as long we acknowledge it.  Humility is better than hubris.  As Albert Einstein once reportedly said, "A true genius admits that he/she knows nothing."