Defining Talent

I would tie your definition to a one-dimensional talent – a (more valuable) multi-dimensional talent could exploit their talents across multiple schemes.

Or something.

You missed a tag: Geoff Ketchum is a Sabermetrician

That sounds more like aptitude, talent seems to explicitly incorporate a degree of relativity – but then the same thing could be said for aptitude, and I have already confused myself.

I disagree a bit on your definition. Talent resides in the player. Scheme can showcase talent, but it can’t create it.

Eric Morris played in a scheme that maximized his talent. I wouldn’t say his talent would just disappear if he transferred to Alabama. It would just be unused.

I agree with cmdr.

Talent = innate ability to excel at a given task.

Coaching = trying to utilize the talents of your players to maximum effect.

ClairBee-
 
Thanks for the input, but I don’t see my definition precluding a multi-dimensional expression. It’s implicit that multiple schemes exist and/or players may function in many.
 
PB -
 
Hey, I try to create sabermetrics for college football all of the time. It’s a bag of fail. What has Geoff been doing exactly?

Geoff Ketchum : Sabermetrician :: Rex Ryan : Orthopedist

Goddamnit, messed up my own joke. Podiatrist. Podiatrist.

I don’t think your definition is unifying. I think you’re redefining the term.

The way it works is that potential times practice equals ability, and then ability needs to be assigned to fit within scheme.

Arriviste -
 
You’ll have to define aptitude vis a vis talent. In some respects, they are almost synonym.
 
cmdr -
 
Is that the Mack Brown view of talent? Compile a random assortment of players who aren’t married to a certain idea of scheme and assume that cream will rise.
 
And scheme can absolutely create, nurture, and foster talent. Is reading a coverage a talent? Repping 1,000 slants over a week creates a muscle memory. A talent.
 
I’m not creating a Platonic definition of talent that exists out in some shadowy world of half-forms. I’m talking about applicable talent. The thing you use to derive actual production.

Rimbo -
 
You may be right. But consider it within the context of why I’m trying to define it.
 
Is Texas talented? A recruiting-centered approach says that we are wildly talented underachievers.
 
A production-centered approach says we are not.
 
A subjective eyeballing approach by a knowledgeable fan suggests that we were both underpowered, underdeveloped, and underschemed. And that each fed the other.
 
My point is: I’m tired of reading definitions of talent that are confused with potential.
 
Talent IS.
 
Potential MIGHT BE.
 
What are the factors that span that bridge?
 
Get where I’m coming from?

From Webster:
Talent:

3: the natural endowments of a person
4a : a special often athletic, creative, or artistic aptitude

Skilled:

1: having acquired mastery of or skill in something (as a technique or a trade

It sounds like you are confusing talent with skill.

Scip-

I think my view on talent stresses recruiting the right type of guys to fit your scheme. Any scheme can use Julio Jones’ talents, but Alabama recruiting Eric Morris would have been just as silly as Texas recruiting Brock Fitzhenry. Wait…

Its up to the coaches to determine what type of talent their scheme maximizes and recruit with that long-term planning in mind.

Also: Reading coverage is a skill. Repping 1,000 slants will create skill.

Skill is honed, talent is innate.

What he said.

bat -
 
The ability to internalize a skill is a talent. We call them skill players for a reason.
 
Football talent is more than your innate genetic material.

Is John Chiles talented? He used to be. I saw it with my own eyes.

Is he now?

cmdr -
 
Good stuff, man. But humor me on my Socratic sideshow a little longer.
 
Julio Jones dropped about forty balls in his career at Alabama. Eric Morris dropped around ten. Is that because Eric Morris is more skilled? Or more talented? Does each player possess a different capacity for learned aptitude or skill in some areas? What factors constitute having better hands?
 
Similarly, is Eric Morris’ on-field intelligence a skill borne of repetition within a system or a superior innate spatial sense?
 
I see people drawing some very clean lines between talent and skill in these debates and I would submit that these lines are not so fine.

nordberg -
 
Exactly.

I agree that the disconnect lies in how each person views talent vs skill. Therefore, I posit that rather than vainly attempt to a unifying definition, that we instead choose a new term to describe maximum realization of talent and skill within the right scheme.

I nominate “Au Fait”

It has a certain je ne sais quoi

I don’t know that I really like this definition….b/c it implies that “talent,” a word used to evaluate the individual, is something beyond the abilities of the player. As you noted, you can have a talented player in a scheme that doesn’t work for them, aka a waste of talent. See Albert Haynesworth as a nose tackle (at least according to him)….or DJ Monroe in Greg Davis’s offense. Their failure is not for lack of talent (maybe lack of effort in Haynesworth’s case), but for lack of development or utilization. I think that’s an important distinction. It’s not that those players aren’t talented, but that that talent isn’t being tapped. I think talent really requires a definition related to capability, but not necessarily output.

Think of it as an oil reserve. A reserve with a lot of “talent” could be a gusher if properly tapped. A small reserve if properly tapped can still be productive. And a huge reservoir is useless if not tapped at all. The size of the reserve is the talent, not the final production obtained from it.

Just my two cents.

Scipio,
Ah now I see where you’re going with this…..

“I see people drawing some very clean lines between talent and skill in these debates and I would submit that these lines are not so fine.”

Is this a product something you have been reading on the blogoshere, or due to listening to insufferable bores that are McShay and Kiper?

Jim Ryun was one of the most inately talented distance runners in US history. He was born with all the tools a distance runner needs. I he hadn’t chosen to be a distance runner and train hard no one would have ever heard about him. Applied to football, all players worthy of a D1 scholarship have some level of tools/potential that they were born with. How they were developed in high school and college determines if the pro’s want to draft them.

Talent + effort = ability

When people say a recruit is “Texas Good” do they mean he is so inately talented that no amount of bad coaching can screw him up? Like VInce Young – once they stopped trying to change his mechanics he was invinceable. Some pun intended.

From an Aggie perspective we have heard that the current Texas roster doesn’t have a lot of “Talent” or pro prospects on it. This is coming from pro scouts. A lot of these players had offers from A&M so it’s not like we didn’t feel they were good players coming out of high school. I think with some recruits there may be grade/star inflation because he has a Texas offer. We would collectively wonder why Mack chose to offer certain players when we had no interest. It’s not an exact science as noted by the number of Div2 & 3 players drafted last week.

I always find the flip side of this coin fascinating. For example Ben Gay, aside from the funny name, had enough physical talent that despite not playing consistent organized football above the High School level, was able to actually make it to the NFL and play, a little.

Physically talented. But never realized his potential. Or maybe he did, given what a head case he was.

I have nothing to contribute, but this is a great discussion.

I think I’m pushing for a definition of talent that is not static and is multidimensional rather than some linear plane of progression.
 
It is not solely the sum aggregate of your genetic material. Nor is it purely your natural aptitude revealed by some scheme. Talent can be learned and instilled and being in the right schemes doesn’t just reveal your innate talent – it may actually create it.
 
Look at the science of how the brain works. Or adolescent development. Certain inputs can actually create a capacity. Not just nurture existing material. Actually grow new stuff.
 
Further, an attempt to cleanly split skill from talent seems fanciful.
 
Bottom line, I think talent is a final expression of multiple factors that can go beyond some innate capacity. However the heck you measure that.

Not sure where this is going, but a few random thoughts -

Scip -

“You’ll have to define aptitude vis a vis talent. In some respects, they are almost synonym.” More than “almost”; my dictionary, at least, says that a “talent” is a “special natural ability or aptitude.”

Also -

“Repping 1,000 slants over a week creates a muscle memory. A talent.”

That sounds more like a “learned skill” than a “talent”, if we’re using the word talent to according to its normal definition of “natural ability or aptitude”. If talent can also mean “things you can learn to do better if properly taught”, then isn’t anything you do better after coaching and practice a talent? And if that’s true, then isn’t “talent” largely devoid of absolute meaning, since most individuals will improve at any activity with proper coaching and repetition?

The issue as posed seems to be more of a relative inquiry. Take the definition from the OP: “Talent is the expression of your developed potential within a scheme”. If Marquis Goodwin and I are both at the WR position, and we each get the same coaching and repetitions in practice (so have each “developed [our] potential”) within the same scheme, we will both improve (become “more talented”) on an absolute basis. But Marquis’ innate abilities — his “talents”, if you will — will make the application of his talent more effective than the application of my talent. In other words, I may go from 0 to 10 on a 1-100 utility scale, but he may go from 80 to 95.

For me, “talent” is the number you start with. The question you seem to be posing has more to do with coaching (identifying whether optimal results in any given moment are achieved from fitting talent to a scheme, or fitting a scheme to talent).

I think I’m pushing for a definition of talent that is not static and is multidimensional rather than some linear plane of progression.

At some point desire becomes a factor, IMO. By that I mean, developing your talent becomes the end, rather than a means to an end. We all know of pros who sign a multi-million dollar contract and seemingly never reach their “potential.” They have reached their goal — supposed financial security — and no longer feel the need to push the limits of their talent.

Then you have players at the other end of the spectrum. For me Chris Ogbonnaya is an example of someone who pushed himself to find out just what the limits of his talents were, and he discovered that they could take him to the NFL.

I also remember Rick McIvor, the most physically “talented” QB I ever saw in a UT uniform until Vince Young. He made it to the NFL, where he was told that if you wanted to do more than just take up a roster space he needed to commit to the process year round and put in the work.

He agreed with the assessment, and walked away from the game.

Talent is the expression of your developed potential within a scheme.

I believe that at some point, the individual decision as to how hard to develop his potential will supersede scheme and define your level of talent.

To use an analogous situation, I look at it like this.

I’m innately good with numbers. That’s my talent.

I choose to refine my talent by studying hard, majoring in math and minoring in econ at MIT. I have now transformed my talent into a tangible skill. Others, who are equally as talented as me, might get a PhD in math. Therefore we would be equally talented, but these other people could have a higher skill level.

Now, I decide to work on Wall Street as a hedge fund manger, which is enabled by the economic structure in the US. This allows to maximize my personal profits pursuant to my attained skill level. This is scheme. My skill in Thailand’s scheme would be less valuable, but my skill level would remain constant—it’s my production that varies.

srr50 -
 
Good stuff man. I guess in my own definition, motivation and desire falls under development. Self-development. Conscious, repeated acts of will meant to grow your ability. Ben Franklin type stuff.
 
McKivor is a great example because he fits the common fan’s notion of talent: huge frame, fast, handsome, gigantic arm, throws a great spiral. I submit to you that McKivor never had a chance to be a NFL QB, no matter what changes he made post-UT. If you don’t get certain skills imbedded into your talent (perhaps even blended with talent) at an early developmental stage – and talent is also mental (reading coverages, decision making) – I don’t think you can do a cram session to get there.
 
BEHorn -
 
In what ways, if any, does your definition of talent described above differ from potential?
 
Doesn’t talent – within the context I write, presuppose an actual output? Thus my emphasis on Talent Is. Not Talent as Could Be. It starts as could be, obviously.
 
Potential’s output is only implied, if at all. Correct?

Oingo Boingo is a good example and he scraped the talent ceiling his senior year at UT and parlayed that into a free agent deal that most guys wouldn’t have earned. I agree that the desire to be great has to factor into the equation somewhere. You can separate the two but talent doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have the desire to use it.

Exhibit A: HenryJames

Exhibit B: Chykie Brown

He had first round physical talent, seventh round intangibles, average the two and you have a fourth round pick. A team like the Ravens sees a guy that needs some enforcers around him on an already salty D and you have a potentially high reward pickup. Or you may have a guy that’s out of the league in three years. It certainly won’t be from a lack of talent.

I saw David Pino today working out at lunch and he mentioned that Roy Williams might have been the laziest player in UT history but the dude still brought it on gameday because he was a physical freak that didn’t have to work that hard to achieve success.

The anti-Shipley.

Hate to go all Golf Prick on you, but I think golf is actually a good arena for discussing this type of thing and many (if not most) people can relate to it.

Some golfers seem to have an innate sense of “touch” in the short game. They just have that feel for how hard to strike a putt or how to take just the right amount off of a wedge shot to make the ball stop more or less where they want to. Certainly they still have to practice it to be good, but even their practice seems to be about “feel”. I would submit that having touch and feel in the short-game is an innate talent.

Now, I was not so blessed. In general, my touch around the greens sucks. However, with a lot of very mechanical practice, I can figure out how far back to swing my putter to make the ball go the desired distance. If I practice it enough, I will be able to reproduce it when I need to. At least most of the time. I may not have an innate talent in the area of touch in the short-game, but I can develop a skill that simulates having that talent.

Of course, if a player with innate talent in that area practices it as much or more than I do, he ought to be better than I am.

So I would submit that talent and skill can supplement one another or even be substitutes for one another, within certain contexts.

I don’t know if this adds to the discussion, or muddies it…

OK, Scip — let’s throw another term out there:

gifted

When srr discussed Rick McIvor as physically “talented,” his writerly chops led him to rightly put talented in quotes because what he really meant was gifted.

McIvor was a genetic freak. So is Malcolm Williams; so was David Aaron; so was Shea Morenz….we could create an entire all-time gifted team of Longhorns. Their genetic material gave them an inherent advantage over other players. But I, like you, do not equate that to talent.

Is Malcolm Williams more talented than Jordan Shipley? No? Really? He’s bigger, stronger and faster, right?

But he is not a more talented football player. Of course, I am not so sure this is just his “developed potential within a scheme.” He was probably never a more talented football player than Jordan Shipley, even absent ambition and work ethic. Rick McIvor probably was never a more talented quarterback than Colt McCoy (yes, McCoy probably did “outwork” McIvor relative to their careers), but McCoy also had some pretty sick talents that we didn’t see as “gifts” until he displayed them in an actual football game.

In other words, there is a lot of talent that is inherent…but not easily measured.

I am not sure that I have contributed one whit to the debate, of course.

It’s not talent; it’s talentS. And even talents have to fit within a much greater decision matrix.

Quick feet = talent, fast recognition/react = talent, strong passing arm = talent, consistently repeatable motion = talent, balance = talent and so on through a checklist of scores of athletic criteria most of them specific to given sports and to specific positions within those sports.

Some talents are useless out of position/scheme/context—Mickey Mantle may well have been the best knuckleballer ever.

Talent evaluation becomes a matter of trade-offs—do you play a Blake Gideon with good head and no feet or a Chykie Brown with no head and good feet?

Overall talent is seldom the only consideration—most college-level coaches will tell you the kid has to present as a decent student before they even look at talent.

The Rivals and Scouts of the world are primarily interested in 1) self-promotion, and so they bump athletes who come to their shows but not the competitions’, and 2) looking smart, and so they adjust rankings according to offers and other second and third-level evidence.

In baseball, I worked with scores of coaches and scouts. Only two ever impressed me as being much above average in evaluating talent. One was good at spotting his kind of hitters and didn’t worry much above defense. The other was all but psychic. He took several 12 y/o AAU teams to national tournaments and even titles and would brutally predict the year each player would drop out of baseball and why—no heart, no head, no speed to play the outfield, will soon be over-matched by pitching, etc. The first batch of those kids are now in their mid-20s. The ones he said wouldn’t finish high school ball didn’t. The ones he said would play college ball did. The few he said would play pro ball are. But he also thought none of them good enough to make the Majors, and so far none has.

Given that experience with that coach, I know there is a real ability to judge real ability. But I also know it is extraordinarily rare. It’s one reason I enjoy reading Scipio’s pieces; he flashes the same rare ability to see things for what they are.

This discussion needs moar Lovell Pinkney!!

How has Brickhorn stayed out of this discussion?

Scipio:
To your point, I remember having conversations with coaches who wondered just how far Rick McIvor could have gone had he grown up, say in San Antonio or Arlington rather than a ranch outside Ft. Stockton.

Ah, this is the good stuff. I leap at just about every chance to delve into some good ol’ metaphysical wanking, particularly when the alternative is having to review expenses on dead deals.

As I started pondering this question, I realized that I was conflating talent (in a football context) with athleticism – partly because that’s the mindset I was put into with the NFL draft-centric lead-in. I think a lot of draft aficionados bemoan when GMs draft a guy on “raw talent” measurables like speed, strength, 3-cone drill time (all measures athleticism with varying degrees of football specificity) instead of guys who are “just football players” (ones who have maximized their athleticism relative to football by successfully employing football-specific skills like running a great out route, throwing a precise square end or employing a spin move and knocking the fuck out of the QB). Is the “less talented” player who ends up throwing up multiple 100-catch seasons (let’s call him Wes Welker) really less talented than the “more talented” guy who never “puts it all together” (let’s call him Charles Rogers)?

I think there’s a lot to like in the ‘developed potential’ part of Scip’s definition. To my mind in a football context, everything that’s contained within your skin – your innate athleticism, your intelligence, your desire to learn and improve at your craft – defines the ceiling of your potential. The development of that potential involves how well you’re able to harness your athleticism in the application of football-specific skills. A receiver’s speed matters, but so does his dedication to improving his hands with the JUGS machine after practice, his learned ability to sell a fake, his meticulously practiced ability to not give away his break with his eyes, and even his courage and concentration to bring in a catch knowing he’ll be belted by the safety.

The John Chiles example is an interesting one. I would submit that Chiles had (in high school) both tremendous athleticism and at least a reasonable desire relative to his peers to apply that talent to football-specific skills in a way that let him express a great deal of his potential. When he got to UT, some degree of his athleticism (in the broadest sense – what components of ‘athleticism’ go into passing accuracy may be the most elusive of any expressed football skill) weren’t equal to the more elevated challenges at the next level. In response to this, his desire waned (substantially), which contributed to a diminishment of his current potential (through bad weight gain) and a diminished fervor for acquiring the football skills needed to succeed at WR.

Gayle Sayers WAS a talented running back. He no longer IS a talented running back, so we accept that talent can erode. If Jamaal Charles takes a handoff as a talented running back, turns the corner as a talented running back, and gets tackled low by the corner and breaks his tibia, is he no longer a talented running back when he hits the ground? Will he be an untalented running back for several months, then a moderately talented one during rehab, then again become a supremely talented one when he’s fully healed?

As a Plan II guy, I’ll admit to an unhealthy affinity for the Platonic ideal. I think a satisfying definition of talent has to encompass what you ARE at a given instant in time as well as what you CAN DO at that instant based on who you are. My modification would be:

Talent is the ABILITY TO EXPRESS your developed potential within a scheme. True talent is best MEASURED by the ability to express your developed potential within the IDEAL scheme.

Reggie Wayne, on third and 9 in a playoff game, has an ability to express his developed potential at the snap of the ball and convert a first down. A lot of bigger, stronger, faster WRs dropped into his shoes in the same spot would NOT have that ability. They might want to just as bad as Marvin does at the snap, but they didn’t do the work over and over and over again, offseason after offseason, to allow them to run the route exactly 9.5 yards, break without tipping, get back to full speed two steps out of the break, and catch the ball right before getting detonated by Polamalu. They don’t have his level of talent.

‘Marvin’ = Reggie above – I kept going back and forth between a ‘has/had’ dynamic in the last paragraph so kept flipping back and forth between Marvin Harrison and Reggie Wayne. Although Marvin’s talent for avoiding prosecution as the prime suspect in a well-publicized murder case shouldn’t be ignored.

Here’s how I view things.

1) Talent is innate. It is or it isn’t. Some people will never run a 4.4. It’s an aptitude. See Webster.
2) Skill is mastery. Talent becomes skill with work and repetition. More talented individuals develop skills more readily.
3) Development means equipping a player to apply a skill in a system.
4) Potential is what happens when development maximizes talent, and a bunch of other external factors work out, including individual ones (work ethic, maturity, desire, etc), team ones (opportunity: depth chart at your position, depth chart at dependent positions, luck, relationships), coaching, schemes, competition, and so on.

To take just a few examples, the triplets in Dallas helped each other reach their potential. We didn’t know what we had in Charles because of scheme and offensive line play. Akina churns out Thorpe winners, and playing next to Suh made Crick a lot of money. Priest Holmes did not maximize his talent at UT. He was also on the bench behind Ricky Williams.

Talent is innate. Potential depends on many factors, including individual (talent, work ethic, maturity, desire, etc), team (opportunity: depth chart, luck, relationships), scheme (managing to strength or not), competition (you posted about the dearth of offensive tackles some years and defensive ends in others, and option teams are difficult to prepare for as long as there are not too many of them), and so on.

So when you say “Consider the fluidity of its expression. In Alabama’s schemes, Texas Tech’s Eric "The Elf" Morris is a nearly useless player. He effectively has no talent”, well, no. The talent/potential equation requires more context.

One final thought. Some managers tend to get the best out of people. They usually manage to strength. Some managers are great recruiters. I would hazard to guess that all good managers fall into at least one of those camps. All great ones do both.

It looks to me like Muschamp and (we hope) Diaz are great at managing to strength. You can tell by the packages he’s put together and the way he structures his packages to minimize player weaknesses. Harsin is just about the very definition of managing to strength. I think if this coaching staff can work together, when you put them together with Mack Brown’s recruiting strength, we could well see a pretty incredible run. This is also why I’m so interested in the Applewhite/Harsin combination.

Just my two cents.

How does Michael Jordan fit into this idea of talent. As a basketball player, he may have been the most talented player of all time. As a baseball player, dude sucked.

Dave Winfield was drafted in football, basketball and baseball. Bo Jackson and Deon Sanders played pro football and pro baseball. That my friends is talent, fuck off, I’m bigger faster and stronger than you talent

Talent is 90% potential you can throw 90, hit a curve, run a 4.3 forty.

But other factors include what Parcells calls the in-game quitter—i.e. people that quit even if you don’t know they’ve quit. They just give up in the face of adversity. Watch wrestling or boxing or mma, you can identify the in game quitter pretty easily—they tend to lose. Navy Seal (hat tip for the double tap to OBL) training is basically designed to eliminate quitters. They don’t particularly care about innate talent.

Finally, Courage, or perhaps a lack of imagination may be a factor too. Think of a QB about to be sacked by a 300 pound lineman or a WR about to be cleaned up by a 250 pound linebacker.

Talent:skill :: art:craft.

Interesting post, Scip.

Similarly, defining talent retrospectively as the number of stars a high schooler had as a senior as it often is on recruiting boards – three to five years after they’ve been in a program – is a little like hiring a college graduate based on their SAT scores. That’s what players were. Or could be. In other words: potential. Talent is what players ARE.

Well, what you’re doing is saying not to ignore 4 years of data when making a hiring decision. I agree with that. Essentially, I take your argument to propose that talent, as a measure of relative capability to perform compared to one’s peers, varies with time. That’s certainly true, and, as a result, one should be careful to use the right measure of talent for a given purpose.

That said, the latest measure of talent is not always the most appropriate measure. For example, I would argue that recruiting rankings are a more appropriate measure of talent than current performance when evaluating the competence of a coaching staff. In that case, what you’re trying to do is isolate talent from coaching. The idea is that performance is determined largely by a function of talent and coaching (and other things, like luck). Put in the talent and the coaching, and performance pops out a few years later. Given measures of talent and performance, one can then back out the coaching staff’s performance. In that context, measuring talent as relative performance in college is tautological and unhelpful. It mashes talent-coming-in with coaching-in-the-years-since into one rough measure and you can’t use it to separate the two.

Of course, if you’re an NFL talent scout, you’re more interested in measuring talent at the end of a college career. After all, who cares what caused the talent at that point? It may be useful to understand whether a player has underperformed his ability because of poor coaching, ill-fit scheme, or the like, but the best available indicator of ability is still the performance at the college level.

In summary, relative ability varies with time. A lot of things can affect it, including inherent qualities (such as genetics) and environmental factors. As such, there is likely no one, immutable talent quotient that dictates success. If you want to use talent as measured by relative performance to predict or analyze, it is necessary to use the correct measure of talent captured at the appropriate time, which is not always “right now.”

Interesting point about MJ, roach. Baseball is the most demanding of our sports talent-wise (takes 12-16 years to play at a top level versus 6-8 for basketball and football) and is by far the most visually demanding. As young players, baseballers actually develop neurons for “strike.” Jordan played as a youth, but he skipped the years where the pitches got faster and faster and more wicked. When he took the game up again, he had not only the team’s lowest batting average but the league’s lowest all because they’d laid down brain cells he hadn’t.

It’s these mental skills that are difficult to evaluate (you can put a stopwatch or eyeball on the physical skills). For example, I was always convinced that what separated Joe Montana as arguably the best NFL qb ever was his rare gift to have his pulse rate and other vital signs chill out as the situational pressure increased. This guy would be a good example of what I’m talking about: http://www.wimp.com/withoutrope/.

Scipio:

What I’d say is that if you have a talent, it means that you have some variable amount of potential. Talent is, to me, something that’s in your genes or otherwise hardened in your development that gives you the ability for something.

A good example of this is rhythm sensitivity. Some people can tell when a rhythm is speeding up or slowing down to a remarkable degree, and others can’t; of those who can’t, they’re unlikely to ever be able to do so, no matter how hard they try. That’s talent.

Then there’s potential, which is to what degree this person can use the talent. If I am missing my right hand, that limits my potential to play the drums with my talent.

Then there’s effort. If you have the talent for rhythm AND both arms, you’re not going to be able to just sit down at a drum kit and start rocking.

So I’d say that talent is more of a fundamental than potential, in that without it, you can’t possibly succeed, but that it is actually less important than potential in terms of predicting success.

What’s more, they’re both completely trumped by effort. I have a good friend who is having a very successful career in music, and he has absolutely no sense of rhythm whatsoever. But by simply outworking the fuck out of everyone, he’s not only successful in his niche, but he’s influential and able to open up doors for others. And if you ever heard his music today, you’d never notice the missing talent.

I think real talent manifests itself despite the scheme. The individual’s ability to grow and adapt enables him/her to make the most of the genetic material he/she is given and adjust it to different environments. Non-shooting Dennis Johnson, point guard for championship teams in both Boston and Phoenix, with very different schemes, is a prime example.

Thet ability to continue to grow and adapt seems to be a combination of how one is raised, the environment in which one is raised (i.e., spoiled brat or frequently challenged), and innate mental skills and instincts, and frankly a spiritual, or willpower, element as well.

In other words, we are all borne with a tendency to find a level and stay there. Some get that beaten or taught out of their system so that they are never satisfied with their current state and hence continue to grow.

Old Time Horn

That is a fascinating take. You’re probably right about neural development, and the visual aspect of baseball cannot be minimized. I was always fascinated when really good hitters described how they saw a pitched baseball and the level of detail, and the amount of information they processed. My own hitting process was more see ball hit ball. I hated people trying to tip pitches etc.

Scipio:

The more I think about it the only two factors that matter to define talent as you seem to be here are natural ability, and persistence. Everything else falls under these two categories.

Natural ability + persistence = talent.

Natural ability is easy to measure. Persistence on the other hand is nearly impossible to measure particularly in a team game where you can hide, take plays off, and basically blame failure on those around you.

I was having an argument on this issue a while back with a friend but in the context of professional success. His position was that intelligence is the single most important variable such that IQ is almost a 100% direct correlation to monetary success(unsurprisingly he’s a double Harvard grad who I will not out but is no doubt reading this thread).

My position was that smarts matter but only up to a certain point, and then emotional intelligence and work ethic kick in. If your IQ is already a hypothetical 130, someone would get more success by improving their ability to relate to others or work harder, than by magically taking a pill to get their IQ to 150. Basically you’d rather be merely sufficiently smart and above average in the other 2, than to be off the charts in IQ and deficient in the others.

I’d put my money on a fairly smart guy with some drive and a little ability to bullshit over a really brilliant and driven mathematics doctorate candidate who will end up living in a hole in west Texas and sending bombs via mail due to his inability to relate to fellow humans (I’m talking, of course, about Huckleberry).

With wide receivers the fool’s gold of intelligence is speed. Take a guy with blazing speed, so-so hands and mediocre route running and you get Alexander Wright. Take a guy with merely sufficient speed, but superior hands and route running and you get Jerry Rice. With QBs it is a rocket arm (Jeff George vs. Joe Montana).

Now of course, no matter how good someone’s hands are they’ll never make it as a WR with a 5.3 forty, just like a QB that can read coverages instantly won’t make it it if he can’t throw the ball 20 yards, and a really hard working and friendly idiot is not going to have much of a career. But people get too fixated on the one threshold talent that a person needs to be a success in that field, and overvalue that area, when really all someone needs is just enough of that talent and then other talents become more important.

Terrific discussion a lot like one I participated in about ten years ago on another board. We got it down to a dynamic interaction between innate physical ability, internal (desire) and external (technique/coaching) developmental factors, scheme using those developed skills and luck (mostly avoiding injuries). Not so far from Scip’s attempt: “the expression of your developed potential within a scheme.”

As to coaching, I remember a college coach discussing Texas high school football talent. He said that the high school coaches in Texas (and really the level of the high school programs) were so much more advanced than other states, that there was some risk in taking kids who had maximized their potential, basically they had no up side.

Thanks, roach. There’s three distinct approaches to hitting, and the Majors are roughly split evenly in the number using each approach. This is not a side discussion; it very much bears on variety of talent, at least baseball talent. Group 1 very much likes having pitches tipped. They look for tells from the pitcher, remember what he pitched in the same spot last time up and so on to figure out what pitch is coming. Group 2 looks for release—wide wrist/narrow wrist, ball leaving the hand up or down, etc. Hitters in this group who can get bifoveal focus (both eyes) on the release can excel. Group 3 doesn’t like having pitches tipped because they read the pitch itself looking for the button on the ball and other features that indicate spin (and thus break).

Whenever a hitter looks truly ugly on a given swing, you can be pretty sure he had the wrong pitch tipped to him.

My position was that smarts matter but only up to a certain point, and then emotional intelligence and work ethic kick in.

All of that is part of a broader sense of “talent.” IQ tests measure a certain kind of intelligence or a certain blend of intellectual capabilities. You hit on a couple of pretty gaping holes in the subject matter of IQ tests: social skills and work ethic. There are certainly other success-determining factors that are unprobed by IQ testing. Passion for your work is one.

The general point to extract from the IQ example is this: the predictive failure of a narrowly-defined measure of talent does not mean that talent, when properly defined, is a poor predictor of success. The key is figuring out what particular blend of skills is important to success in a given endeavor, and testing for aptitude in those skill sets.

Oldtime:

Given your three groups, I’m thinking that group one tends to lack talent (relative to other pros) and needs to overcome that with knowledge. Group two and three are similar in that they have amazing visual ability they just process different stimuli. Is this what your saying? Or is there a distinction between groups two and three that I don’t get.

To say nothing of the actual swing mechanics which also has a significant effect on success.

“We got it down to a dynamic interaction between innate physical ability, internal (desire) and external (technique/coaching) developmental factors, scheme using those developed skills and luck (mostly avoiding injuries).”

That sounds like variables in a formula for success: Talent + desire + teaching + scheme + luck. Talent is a necessary variable to address, but that formula is not what talent “is”.

Talent can’t be measured entirely by achieved potential, both because internal factors may negate talent and external factors can diminish or retard it. Examples -

Internal: A guy may be lightning fast but too dumb to learn scheme, so his talent (great speed) can’t be utilized properly to achieve meaningful results.

External: A guy may be lightning fast and not too dumb to learn scheme, but the scheme may be so flawed that his talent isn’t properly utilized to achieve meaningful results.

Why not just concede that talent = innate physical ability or aptitude (since that’s what it in fact means), and instead address a formula for success?

Mickey Mantle, IMO.

I read the summary of that hitting groups study in the NYTimes (I think it was) in the mid-90s. It ran like a page and a half—some detail. I hadn’t thought of it that way, that Group 1 had less visual skill, because the article was at pains to stress that comparisons of the groups yielded similar stats. Where they varied was against particular pitchers. Also, I recall that Group 3 was better on mistake pitches.

You have to have extraordinary visual acuity to hit major league pitching. My GUESS is that Group 1 has comparable visual acuity to the others. It’s just how they learned to be successful at figuring out what pitch they’d be seeing.

A much rarer hitting visual skill yet is having the depth perception at a distance to distinguish between fastball and change-up. Only an average of about one player per team (in the 90s—Jason Giambi was one) was capable of it, and all (I believe) who could had learned the skill following intensive training with sports vision consultants.

Ted Williams had at one time the best vision ever measured by the USMC. In the ‘70s, a player asked him how to differentiate between a fastball and a curve, right when it’s thrown. He was expecting some kind of tip about the pitcher’s shoulder, or something. Williams told him that you could tell a curve by the way the laces rotated as the ball came off the pitcher’s fingers. “Uh, thanks, I think”. Of course, Williams worked very hard at hitting too. That describes most of sports’s "greatest evers"- far right tail of the bell curve of innate natural ability (speed, strength, reactions), and far right of the bell curve of competitiveness (willing to work, drive, pain tolerance). Of course, most athletes fall short in one or both facets.

It’s easy to talk about talent on the 2005 Longhorns team. It was all over the place, and mostly used appropriately. The 2010 Longhorns are a different example. Did you know that no Texas recruit from the 2006 – 2008 classes has been (or is likely to be) drafted? And 2009 isn’t looking that great on offense either?

Our 2006 class was ranked #5 in the nation by Rivals. Here are the offensive recruits-

Burnette, Cobb, Harris, Marshall, McGee, Mitchell, Moore, Payne, Smith, Snead, Watts, Webb, and Webber. (6) 4-stars and (7) 3-stars should yield a couple of NFL players, but it looks like Webb (transfer to WTAMU) will be the only one.

2007 offensive recruits were Allen, Chiles, Collins, Harris, Hix, Howard, Huey, Irby, Johnson, Kinne, Kirkendoll, McGaskey, Whittaker and Williams. (1) 5-star, (10!) 4-stars, and (3) 3-stars. Who from this bunch does the NFL care about?

Obviously, 2 years are just a fluke. Surely 2008 will be different. Let’s see- Buchanan, Buckner, Fitzhenry, Grant, Hales, Hicks, Hills, Monroe, Newton, Poehlmann, Roberson, and Snow. (7) 4-stars and (5) 3-stars.

That’s 3 classes, 39 recruits, (1) 5-star, (23) 4-stars, and (15) 3-stars. Average of 3.6 stars. I think the only ones with NFL chances are the ones that transfered or never nade it in (remember when the coaches dropped Hicks as soon as his grades gave them an excuse?). Per my previous studies, there should be 8 NFL guys from a group like that, give or take a few. How do we manage such a record of futility? Was Texas, and all of the schools that recruited these guys, wrong?

I’m sure you could make a story for each one of these guys, and you would be right. It is still damning of the program that none broke through. Possible systemic reasons are-

1. Over rated. UT offered these guys, so they got a star bump. Aftyer all, if Texas wants them, they have to be good, right? Besides, they’re all big and fast, right?
2. Under-developed. UT’s staff on offense was lazy, and offering kids that wuld commit quickly. Texas’ staff just wanted to throw a bunch of talented guys out there and let Darwinism develop their talent.
3. Under-motivated. The kids that committed quickly really were more interested in wearing an orange jersey in Austin than being elite football players. They met 90% of their personal goals when they were given numbers as freshmen.
4. Poorly suited for their positions. The Texas coaches were possibly recruiting from a list, and not necessarily for a scheme. This explains why Texas wanted Mallett so badly fresh off winning a MNC with VY. Or why Texas recruited so many big WRs when the Davis offense is not configured to throw the ball to a tightly covered guy who can fight for it.

I think the reason is all three. It is very telling that this problem is exclusively on offense. That said, replacing Davis only fixes these problems in recruiting classes going forward, with the possible exception of motivation. There are techniques coaches can apply to motivate players. You will recognize their use when you start seeing guys quit ad transfer.

talent might be that you’re fast and potential is the ability to get faster.

scheme puts you in the position to use your talent, and potential maximizes it.

skill is learned—like reading a defense. That’s what film does, hones up your skills. But if you’re not talented enough to make the throws—some will never be able to throw deep regardless of reps, strength, mental acumen…

OK now define “Heart”?

 As a former athlete “Heart” is just as important as talent. In my opinion anyone with average skills who has tons of Heart and Determination can become good at anything. Not great but good. Now define “Good”

How many times have you witnessed a ultra talented athlete that had no heart or desire. To make it to the top one must have Heart, Determination, and Talent.

Talent is defined by a negation. It is what you don’t have when you go 5-7 with Greg Davis as OC. Only in a world with Greg Davis as OC can talent be defined.

Talent = physical gifts + aptitude + intelligence
Ability = Talent + fortitude + discipline

That’s a very good analysis, TaylorTRoom, of our recruiting situation of recent years. To myself, I chalk it up as successful millionaire coaches no longer feeling the push to do the hard work, but then that could be lazy analysis on my part, so I don’t speculate out loud.

The Williams analysis is a bit off though. Like Williams, I had 20/10 vision. As a young man I would amaze people with my ability to discern things at a distance, but I was far from the sultan of sandlot swat. Plus even Williams himself said it had to do less with his visual acuity and more with his constant study of pitchers.

It turns out that static visual acuity and dynamic visual acuity are so poorly correlated that there are basketball teams in regular leagues composed of schoolkids who read braille but play ball unimpaired. And no player, not even Williams, could track a rotating seam. However, anybody with decent “smooth pursuit” tracking can see the artifacts created by rotating seams.

The general color of the ball (whiter = faster spin, pinker = slower), the presence of a “button” (spin axis) and its size, and the visual signature of 2-seam spin versus “squirrelly” spin (my term for the more erratic spin on pitches such as splitters) versus spinless (knucklers). It gets automatic fast. This is what my Group 3 above is all about, “seeing” spin, and a lot of pitchers give thought to disguising their spin. That’s why a hammer (hard curve) mixed with a 4-seamer is difficult for this group—both present as a white, seamless, buttonless ball, indistinguishable if you weren’t watching wrist profile at release. Same for 2-seam and cutter—hard to distinguish, even with 20/10 vision.

The original meaning of talent was a (very large) weight or sum of money. I think this definition still applies in the SEC. In Middle English, the word took on a meaning of “inclination, leaning, will, or desire” which developed from the figure of the inclination or tilting of a balance. This notion of disposition, will or desire is certainly relevant to some of the discussion so far.

The modern meaning of talent as a “power or ability of mind or body, viewed as something divinely entrusted to a person for use and improvement” is derived from an interpretation of the parable in the Bible. Thinking about talent in the context of the story from which the modern definition derives can provide a useful way of distinguishing the different terms and concepts that have been bandied about on this thread. Consider the individual who was given 5 talents and, by his industry, multiplied what he had to attain a total of 10 talents. The initial endowment of 5 talents would represent the man’s raw or innate ability. Through his effort, he increased that to 10 talents, but perhaps he could have done even more and attained 15 talents. The maximum he could achieve given his initial endowment is what I would call potential. Talent is what he actually has (or is, or can do) at any given time.

If we update the metaphor using the terms and concepts of modern economics, I would equate talent with capital. Capital is the capacity, ability, or power that facilitates the production of some valuable output, but is not consumed in the production process. There is an initial endowment of capital (i.e. an athlete’s raw physical gifts), and the stock of capital (talent) may be increased by investment (of effort, training, etc) or depreciate through neglect. Scheme is the production function or technology that transforms capital (talent) into valuable output. The amount of output you get from a given amount (or form) of capital depends on the particular technology in which it is employed.

jones -
 
No, I think you added a lot. Shipley vs Williams is a good example because it demonstrates the difference between someone who conceives of talent as Bench + 40 + height + vertical leap + how you look in pads (90% of fans) instead of quickness, stop-start ability, route-running, hands, athletic intelligence, spatial awareness, concentration.
 
I remember arguing with a friend for days when he remarked that it’s impossible that Jerry Rice ran a 4.6 given his total dominance of the game. It was gamesmanship and his “real time” must have been in the 4.3s. It’s hard for people to fit contradictory information into a world view that tells them simple measurable dictate all athletic success.
 
Shipley is a better football player in every productive measure vs a Malcolm Williams and it’s not because he has more heart (which is generally how fans address any deficit explaining a gap between combine measurements and performance) but because he is more gifted. Talented. He’s more talented than the guy that’s bigger, stronger, faster. It’s just that those gifts aren’t easily expressed in a number, so they are supposed to be intangible. But they’re not. Watch Jordan Shipley get in and and out his breaks. It’s right there in front of us.
 
nobis60 -
 
Great contributions. You get where I’m coming from.
 
BrickHorn -
 
Right. There is talent as film – all past development over time and attempts to project forward on some sort of line of growth and talent the snapshot. A smart evaluator tries to look at both.
Both are lies when taken out of context.
 
Rimbo -
 
Good stuff.
 
Kosciusko -
 
I don’t think real talent manifests itself despite the scheme.
 
There are so many examples that contradict that idea.
 
Here’s one: when Vince Lombardi took over the Green Bay Packers, they already had SEVEN future NFL Hall of Famers on the roster. And they weren’t rookies.
 
Their record without Lombardi was 1-10-1. The worst team in GB Packer history. With Lombardi, they’re 7-5 the next year and then begin a decade of dynasty.
 
How many of those players make the Hall of Fame if Lombardi doesn’t coach them?
  
How do we remember Vince Young’s career if he we don’t run Houston Madison’s offense for him?

I think of football talent as what it takes to win conference and national titles. Usually teams that accomplish those things on a reasonably frequent basis have a fair number of first round NFL draftees that succeed in the NFL.

Does that help?

…the retroactive frame we apply to explain how a job got done well. We first create the illusion that the individual accomplished the task entirely on his or her own, and then we start projecting that individual’s quantifiable characteristics onto others hoping this means their success will be easily replicable. Standard positivist stuff. Every best-selling book on management ever written.

While I try to come up with a defiition for “talent,” I refer to TTR’s in-depth studies on star rankings from high school and NFL likelihood. It’s standard stuff—and true—to state that rankings are far from perfect—pretty obvious. But they do make a pretty strong statement nonetheless. Whoever would honestly believe they’re just as well off with a bunch of three stars as they are a mix of four- and five-stars simply ignores reality.

So maybe what I’ve been saying is that, rather than “talent,” it’s “raw material” that we’ve had plenty of. It’s been my consistent beef that the “stuff” we bring onto campus is simply possesses far more “potential” than what we saw last year, and in some ways—offensively speaking—that goes for ’09 as well.

TTR notes something I’ve stated other places—-there’s a reason(s) why the disparity in O’ and D’ has existed in terms of NFL draftees (and, to an extent, production on the field in recent times). I don’t think “raw material” out of high school is the reason, since the star rankings of offensive and defensive personnel are stunningly alike.

No experiment with Furbush. He was a starter all throughout his minor lg career. 22 MLB IP as an RP doesn’t make him an RP.