Can the NFL Avoid Another Aaron Hernandez?

This is not about former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez. I never met him. I never interviewed him, and I certainly never assessed him—but I’ve assessed too many others like him. The reality is that assessing violence in athletes is necessary to changing the way a team can evaluate not only potential, but risk in a player.

We do not have established statistical base rates of violent crime for athletes. We don’t have them for professional athletes and we don’t have them for the NFL. Predicting violent crime amongst athletes can be searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack. This is not easy to do, but I can tell you that there has yet to be any research that demonstrates that either a) athletes are more violent than non-athletes or b) when an athlete does commit a violent crime that being an athlete is a causative factor in the crime. The research that points to either assertion is rife with methodological flaws and self-fulfilling prophecies. In my book: Anger Management in Sport, I reviewed and called into question, the literature that tried to demonstrate higher levels of violence in the NFL and athletes in general. The bottom line, studying it is very, very difficult.

In the forensic psychology world, we do risk assessments for sexual recidivism, we use actuarial tools with the hope of nailing down better predictions of a behavior that occurs very rarely. Granted, sex offenses are shocking and horrible, but they don’t happen as frequently as it may seem at times and recidivism of those behaviors post-incarceration is not very high. This is what happens with low base rate behavior. Behaviors that naturally occur with a very low frequency are very difficult to predict accurately. We try to identify factors that are more predictive, but it is an arduous task. If you add to it the fact that the consequences are high, one can appreciate the dilemma. If the consequences are big enough, it doesn’t matter how small the probability of it happening is. If it happens to you or a loved one, then statistics don’t matter.

Again, not only is there no facsimile in the athlete world, sport psychologists are not being trained to do these assessments. Few sport psychologists have experience dealing with criminal behavior, severe anger problems, gang interventions, and certainly not prediction of violence. Do they assess character? Yes, to a degree…primarily with personality inventories like the MMPI, 16PF, MCMI and the like; that were not designed to assess or predict violence. More commonly, sport psychologists are assessing coachability, intelligence, maybe mental flexibility, increasingly baseline neuropsychological testing for concussion management, maybe team cohesion issues. But, assessment and prediction of violence and/or criminal behavior, sport psychologists are not trained to assess. It’s time to change that.

Primarily, teams make these decisions by trying to synthesize the data from the player development/scouting staff, the security folks that do the background checks, the results of the psychological evaluation (that isn’t geared towards predicting violence/criminality) the head coach and the GM. If you take the basic premise that past behavior predicts future behavior (which by the way, is often not true), then many pro athletes should have been discarded….oh, but wait a minute. Maybe the reality is that athletes that have “character questions” are not discarded so long as they can help win games? Yes. It is a gamble. You try to balance one’s athletic talents and what they are worth against their risk of violating conduct clauses or being suspended. This could be for drug violations, for recreational or performance enhancing substances, or for an arrest. It is not easy and there are players that do drop in the drafts because of these concerns.

Stating that the Patriots should’ve known better is revisionist history in that Hernandez was ranked to go much higher in the draft. Some teams reportedly took him off the board because they saw him as too big a risk. The Patriots made a calculated risk that paid off in the short term (they got two excellent years out of Hernandez) and is costing them in the long term. This is the challenge teams have. When an athlete transgresses, out come the comments, “tsk tsk…you shouldn’t have drafted them”, but until then (and it often never happens), front offices look brilliant when the gamble pays off.

The skillset that sport psychologists need in order to help teams make better predictions are the following. They must know how to assess, both with psychological tests and in interview:

• Antisocial/Psychopathic tendencie
• Emotional lability and explosiveness
• Anger Management Skills & implementation thereof
• Attitudes about Violence (including Domestic and Sexual Violence)
• Gang Involvement
• Interplay Between Drug/Alcohol Use and Deviant Behavior
• Impulsivity and Frustration Tolerance
• Respect/Fear/Contempt for Authority
• Suicidality, Self-injury, Risk-taking behavior and Threats towards others
• Subtle Signs of More Serious Mental Illness

The more the sport psychologist can provide information on these topics to the front office and coordinate their findings with that of the security personnel, the better the predictions will be. Nonetheless, it will always be a gamble. And predicting behavior in the near future is hard enough, predicting five, ten years out, is extremely difficult.

So, are there things that teams can do to make better predictions? Yes. Will they? We’ll see. Considering the money that is at stake, it would seem that, morality aside, it is a better business strategy to continually improve this assessment process.

In addition to focusing on the college and pro athletes, youth and high school sports need to simply have a more aggressive stance on continued athletic participation when athletes break rules. End the days of deifying athletes and coaches so they believe they can do no wrong. Hold them accountable as children and adolescents and perhaps, even when showered with fame and fortune, their responsibility and good character will shine through when they are well-rounded, adult athletes