Irrelevance Glorified

So, if you know me, you know that I don’t like Tom Brady. In fact, even if you don’t really know me, you might suspect that I hate Tom Brady, considering that I’ve made two posts consisting solely of the fact that I hate Tom Brady, on occasions where he has suffered devastating losses.

So why do I hate Tom Brady? Well, it doesn’t help that he played football at Michigan. My loathing of Michigan football is even deeper than that for Tom Brady. But it’s more than that. You see, I dislike all “good-looking” quarterbacks. Tom Brady is already a quarterback. He plays the most important position for the most popular sport in America. He makes millions of dollars because he’s actually really good at it. He has probably spent his entire life, since high school, as the center of adulation and attention. He should not get to knock up famous actresses and then marry supermodels. It’s just not right. If you’re going to be a successful quarterback, you should be homely. Otherwise, this is all just unbalanced. Booo, Tom Brady. Yeah, Kyle Orton!

Basically, though, my argument is seeded in jealousy and an inapplicable standard of justice. That’s just petty and irrational. Luckily, science has stepped in an gave me a plausible, legitimate reason for my prejudices! I think this study has been bouncing around for a little while, but I was only made aware of it recently. As this Deadspin post summarizes from this WSJ article and also this much older Times article (don’t know how long all these articles will stay up, so I’ll just link to all of them), NFL starting quarterbacks are unnaturally attractive. A group of researchers (David Berri & Jennifer VanGilder) looked at the faces of NFL quarterbacks and measured how symmetric their faces were. Studies have shown that facial symmetry is a measure of attractiveness that spans all races and cultures. It is by no means the only measure of attractiveness, but it’s one that can be easily figured out by computers and image analysis (as opposed to having babies of different cultures look at pictures of faces, and seeing what faces they spend more time staring at, which is seriously how research into attractiveness has been conducted).

There are two interesting conclusions from their work. For one, the symmetry level for starting NFL quarterbacks (I assume this is the 2007 or 2008 season) was always higher than 96%, while an average person has a symmetry of 90%. Unless it turns out that genes for symmetry are the same as for good quarterbacking, this suggests that good looking youngsters are steered towards the quarterback position, or at least the good-looking kids gets more snaps and attention during practices.

The second conclusion was that the more attractive quarterbacks get paid more than they should based on performance. As the Times article states :

To put this result in perspective, we found that a “good-looking” quarterback like Kerry Collins or Charlie Frye earned approximately $300,000 more per year than his stats and other pay factors would predict. Meanwhile, quarterbacks like Jeff George and Neil O’Donnell, who, sadly, were not found to have very symmetrical faces, suffered an equivalent penalty.

But it’s not the Brett Favres — the guys often referred to as “the face of the franchise” — who receive the greatest return on their handsome faces. It’s the QBs clinging to the bottom of the roster who get the biggest pay bump from good looks

So you see, my hate of “good-looking” quarterbacks is completely justified. They use their good looks to subconsciously curry favor with coaches and GM’s, from childhood all they way through to NFL retirement age. My “irrational” hate is merely compensation for the favorable treatment they’ve received all their life.

I’ve read the newspaper and blog articles. To this point, though, they’ve just been articles in the WSJ and the Times, though, and haven’t mentioned anything like “as published in the Journal of Sports Externalities” or anything. So it sure looks like this work has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet. Still, it supports what I believe already, so I’m inclined to believe it anyway.

Booooo, Tom Brady!

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