Thread by @crimkadid

Every few years a different nerd discovers the same thing about NFL quarterbacks: that they're much, much more blue eyed than the general population. And yet somehow this information never spreads to the public; it's like the men in black show up and arrest the noticers.

This guy for example, claims to have examined the eye colors of Super Bowl winning quarterbacks and discovered that 80% of them have blue eyes. thesportscol.com/2014/01/like-b…

Before I had read that letter, I went through a USA Today list of top 50 quarterbacks and estimated that about 60% of them were blue eyed. The average in the UK is no more than about 40% and I doubt US whites are any lighter. You can see estimated values for eye color here:

In 1974 Morgan Worthy wrote a book called “Eye Color: A Key to Human and Animal Behavior” that was prominent enough to have been reviewed in Newsweek. It’s a wide ranging book, but it arose from his original observation that quarterbacks in his day were also very light eyed.

Before I go into details, you really need to see this for yourself. “Blue” is a broad category; NFL quarterbacks have extremely blue eyes in a way that makes this association really easy to detect. Here to start off is the consensus greatest QB ever, Tom Brady.

Brady grew up watching Joe Montana, the old consensus greatest, as a child in Northern California. Despite being 100% Italian, Montana’s eyes are albino blue:

The greatest brown eyed QB ever is Peyton Manning, the best green eyed one Brett Favre. After these two you start to see a line of guys whose eye color could be spotted from a mile away. Here’s Drew Brees:

John Elway

Johnny Unitas

Dan Marino is in the running with Montana for title of bluest eyes ever:

After quarterbacks, I took a look at white golfers that had won the Masters. Of the 24 I could positively identify 70% were blue eyed. My hunch was based on the extremely fair Jack Nicklaus; using Gretzky as inspiration I looked at Hart Trophy winners: 57% were blue eyed.

If there was ever a time that this information would have become public knowledge it would have after Nicklaus’ Masters victory in 1986, when the four most accomplished white athletes in America were these guys:

But here comes the really disturbing part: before I found hard numbers elsewhere I decided to use Presidents as a neutral sample to compare against the QBs. But it turns out Presidents are also overwhelmingly blue eyed chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-19….

In 1988 Bob Greene estimated that 26/39 Presidents had been blue eyed. Since then every Prez except Obama has had fair eyes; in fact every white guy from Trump to Reagan has been blue eyed. This suggests that the blue eyed advantage is not so much athletic as mental.

This is a big subject, so I’ll cut it off now and tweet more later about the underlying mechanism: how some people think eye color is an indicator of behavioral inhibition and the ability to make fast decisions under pressure.