Jake Haener never thought of himself as an ace test-taker, but nothing about answering questions on the S2 Cognition Test reminded him of school.
Identifying moving objects on a computer screen and needing to quickly shake off a mistake felt more like skills he has honed on the football field — and maybe that’s why the former Fresno State quarterback suddenly looks like a top student when it comes to the test becoming a bigger part of NFL Draft evaluations.
With the draft set for April 27-29, teams currently are reviewing every tidbit in hundreds of detailed prospect profiles to help make razor-thin separations and finalize boards.
“It’s probably the first 97 percent I’ve ever gotten in my life,” Haener quipped to Post Sports+ of his S2 Cognition Test score. “When they first told me it was going to NFL teams, I was nervous because I’ve never been good at taking long, sit-down exams. But it’s different than school. I feel like this gives you the opportunity to go with God-given ability and react. I enjoyed it.”
The S2 Cognition Test advertises an evaluation of how athletes “process and make split-second decisions” specific to their sport. For football, it tests nine skills: Perception speed, search efficiency, tracking capacity, visual learning, instinctive learning, decision complexity, impulse control, distraction control and improvisation, per the company website.
Fifteen NFL teams subscribe to S2 and have exclusive access to otherwise unverifiable scores, co-founder Brandon Ally said last week on “The Season with Peter Schrager Podcast.” It is an alternative, or supplement, to the traditional Wonderlic test — a 12-minute-timed 50-question math and verbal IQ test that the NFL administered to prospects for decades until 2022 — that the Athletes First agency had Haener and other clients take at their offices.
“We stay away from the IQ piece, the whole booksmarts thing,” Ally told Schrager. “We’re going to assume that scouts and front offices have done their homework on how well a guy is going to learn their playbook. What we measure is the rapid cognitive processing that occurs once the ball is snapped.
“You can hear all the armchair quarterbacks in the world tell you, ‘If the [defensive back] covers the curl, you throw to the flat. If he covers the flat, you throw to the curl.’ It’s way more complex than that. A host of quarterbacks can tell you the rules, but when the ball is snapped and they have to filter through all of those rules, they become slow. They hesitate. They may throw to the wrong route.”
How does S2 testing work? Haener, who is the No. 6 quarterback in The Post’s rankings for the 2023 draft class, compared one section to a faster version of the old arcade game “Pong.”
“There’s a bunch of those little balls — some screens could be 30, 40, 50, or 10 — bouncing around,” Haener said. “It highlighted 2-3 balls, or 7-9, in red and they flashed at the beginning. You had to track these balls all over the place as it played for about 4-5 seconds. When it paused, you identify which were the highlighted ones in the beginning. So, you are seeing things very fast and tracking things using peripheral vision to understand where they are and where they end up.”
It should not come as a surprise then that scouts say one of Haener’s biggest strengths is an ability to throw receivers open with anticipation.
Test-takers are seated at a specialized computer with headphones and a modified keyboard for about 30-45 minutes. About 4,000 professional football players have participated since about 2016, Ally said, so Haener’s score means he performed in the 97th percentile relative to others in the database.
“It’s exactly like a pop quiz,” Haener said. “It was something you can’t really prepare for because you don’t have an idea of what it’s like until you do it. If you try to think too much then you are not going to be able to score well because the images you are trying to react to disappear by the time you have a chance to think.”
Sounds frustrating? Well, how do you think it feels to miss an open receiver on second down because of a misreading the defense?
“The test will frustrate you a little bit because it’s so fast-paced and you don’t have a lot of time to analyze what just happened before it moves onto the next part,” Haener said. “You have to move on and execute the next segment. That’s pretty realistic [to football].”
The tests used have existed in science labs for decades but were repurposed for sports by Ally and co-founder Scott Wylie, who began development at LSU, expanded to include the New Orleans Saints and then to one team (and ultimately two) in each NFL division.
One NFL executive familiar with using S2 scores told Post Sports+ that it is a challenge to find data predictive of success because the test is still relatively new.
“It’s all a piece of the puzzle, but it doesn’t drive the decision-making,” he said. “We [haven’t] drafted guys because they did well on the test. It’s another resource to use as a checks and balances.”
Haener described a second test with one of four corners of a diamond disappearing as fast he could blink that corresponded to a four-directional control in his hand.
Added complexities include rules correlated to what a quarterback might be coached in his route progression — press right for a red arrow, press left for a blue arrow … unless a certain override appears and dictates pressing right for a blue arrow.
“I think it’s a little faster [than it happens on the field],” Haener said. “The goal is to help you try to slow things down when you.
“Your pre-snap recognition is like the red balls. You have to remember where those pieces were. Once you are looking left, you might only get half the picture. So you have to put together what’s on the other side of the picture from what you saw 3-5 seconds ago. Once you try to put those two together and try to match it, you process it and you are like, ‘This is what I’m seeing front-side. Backside, I have an idea what could be going on there, so I need to go there with the ball instead.’”
Ally’s belief is that the nine different tests combine for a profile that allows a team to match up a prospect’s playing strengths with a specific scheme or coach’s tendencies.
“Once I see my boundary hook defender take one step to the left and declare [his positioning], I know I’m going to get the dig right behind it,” Haener said. “It’s like the diamond disappearing. Instead of taking that extra half-second to really watch him run to the stick, once I see him take a step and use his eyes, and manipulate him to go there, then I can get the space behind him. It all correlates to how fast you can understand that and see that happening. If you are too late to react, then it’s too late.”
In the NFL’s implementation of S2 testing, it’s still early. But the response is growing.
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Cole-perstown
This is what $324 million is supposed to look like.
After three very good seasons to start his Yankees’ career, Gerrit Cole, 32, is making a case as the best pitcher in baseball in 2023. Cole improved to 4-0 with a 0.95 ERA — fourth-lowest in MLB — and 32 strikeouts in 28 ⅓ innings by tossing a 109-pitch complete-game shutout Sunday to beat the Twins.
Cole, whose ERA at the end of April was 1.43 in 2021 and 3.00 in 2022, has stepped up his game to pre-Yankees levels at a critical time when starting rotation mates Luis Severino, Frankie Montas and Carlos Rodon are on the injured list.
But manager Aaron Boone took praise of Cole to new heights after Sunday’s game.
“He’s a great pitcher that, I believe, is going to end up in Cooperstown one day,” Boone said.
Sounds nice. But how realistic is that Hall of Fame induction?
Of the 10 pitchers listed by Baseball Reference with “similarity scores” closest to Cole through 31 years old, only one (Roy Halladay) made the Hall of Fame. A second, Max Scherzer, almost certainly will be inducted five years after he retires.
Looking at the other eight …
Two — Johnny Cueto and Stephen Strasburg — remain active. Neither has a legitimate Cooperstown case.
The rest of the list includes three Cy Young Award winners — Johan Santana (two), David Price and Don Newcombe, as well as Jered Weaver, Tim Hudson and Roy Oswalt. Cole has five top-five finishes in Cy Young voting but has never won the award.
Weaver, Price and Oswalt, who rank No. 2-4 respectively behind Scherzer on the Cole comparison list, all were in a downward spiral by their age-33 season. Strasburg has pitched eight games over four seasons after his 31st birthday, and Santana pitched 21 games in one season after turning 31.
The difference between Cole and most of his statistical peers is that the Yankees’ ace — who is signed through 2028 — seems to have plenty left in the tank to extend his prime.
Hall of Fames often reward dominance over the long haul — Halladay won his first Cy Young in 2003 and his second at age 33 in 2010 — over flash-in-the-pan brilliance.
So, maybe Boone has more of a point than the comparisons initially indicate if Cole stays healthy and delivers a clutch moment or two in Octobers to come.
No-show notice
The Giants and Jets officially open the voluntary portion of their offseason programs Monday and the biggest stories will be attendance for the two-hours-per-day of strength and conditioning activities.
Or, rather, absences due to contract disputes.
Running back Saquon Barkley and defensive tackle Dexter Lawrence plan to skip the Giants’ report date as they negotiate new deals.
Defensive tackle Quinnen Williams made it known in January that he would not rejoin his Jets teammates without the type of new contract that hasn’t come.
Is it a big deal? Not really as long as the players are trusted to remain committed to staying in shape on their own because the first two weeks of the offseason program is restricted to strength and conditioning exercises. Holdouts become a bigger deal on May 22, when coaches and players can be on the field together for the first time.
Both the Jets and Giants, though, should be racing to re-sign their defensive tackles in hopes of getting the better bargain.
The Titans’ Jeffrey Simmons just re-signed for an average of $23.5 million per year, after the Commanders’ Daron Paye ($22.5 million per year) and the 49ers’ Javon Hargrave ($21 million per year) signed last month.
Lawrence and Williams certainly will be looking to further push the market, as is their unspoken responsibility to the NFL Players Association.
If the Giants sign Lawrence for more than Simmons, there is a new marker for Williams to top. If the Jets sign Williams for more than Simmons, there is a new marker for Lawrence to top.
For Williams and Lawrence, is it more important to get paid quickly? Or is the status of being the new No. 2-highest paid defensive tackle to the untouchable Aaron Donald ($31.6 million per year) more important? Both Williams and Lawrence are under contract on fifth-year options in 2023 if extensions do not get finalized.
Barkley’s situation is its own animal because he is not permitted to report as an unsigned free agent who is prohibited from negotiating with other teams under the terms of the franchise tag.
The Giants have the seldom-used right to rescind an unsigned tag, so Barkley might be treating the first round of the NFL Draft (April 27) as the date to commit before another running back is added.
Or Barkley could wait beyond the draft as he tries to regain leverage by missing on-field practices and gambling that the Giants realize their offensive prospectus is bleak without his services.
The difficult part for Barkley is coming to grips with the fact his agency misread the depressed running-back market in free agency and advised him to turn down a three-year contract that averaged $13 million per year with an unknown amount of guaranteed money. At least six teams were expected to pursue Barkley if he became a free agent, sources told Post Sports+.
Because the Giants can franchise tag Barkley at $10.1 million this year and again at $12.1 million next year, Barkley’s two-year guarantee is $22.2 million … but that’s only if he stays healthy.
The fear for running backs is a career-altering injury while playing on a contract year. Can Barkley avoid that worst-case scenario for the second straight season?
He’s not about to risk injury in practice, that’s for sure.
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