Tag Archives: NFL

Looking for data on Ray Lewis’ comment about the football lockout and crime

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Ray Lewis has gained a lot of attention with his recent comment that crime would increase if there was no football in the fall:

In an interview with ESPN, Lewis suggested that the NFL lockout could cause a spike in crime. “Do this research,” Lewis said. “If we don’t have a season. Watch how much evil, which we call crime, how much crime picks up, if you take away our game. There’s nothing else to do.”

Lewis offered no evidence from prior work stoppages that crime rose when the NFL season shut down. “I don’t know how he [Lewis] can make that kind of determination without having more facts,” New York Giants defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka told CBS Sports, in response to Lewis’ comments. If the current dispute between owners and the players crept into the season, forcing the cancellation of games, the economic impact would be harsh for the stadium workers and local retail establishments who serve fans on game-day. There will be significant spillover effects. But would a bored populace turn to street looting because the Steelers aren’t on TV?

Kiwanuka is in agreement with a lot of others that have suggested that Lewis’ comments were strange and unsubstantiated. But why haven’t we seen many people use data to refute Lewis’ claim? We could look at two possible scenarios that Lewis was describing:

1. The more limited scenario: in the times when football games would normally be played, crime would be higher. I remember news stories during the Chicago Bulls’ championship runs in the 1990s about the decrease in ambulance calls and emergency room visits during games and I recall seeing similar stories about NFL playoff games. Couldn’t police departments or other agencies quickly go through their files to see whether crime rates differ during NFL games compared to other times? (Run a comparison between Sunday afternoons of bye weeks or weeks when the team plays on Sunday, Monday, or Thursday night compared to typical Sunday afternoon game times.)

2. The broader scenario: overall, crime would be higher when there are no football games. This would take some more data work to find comparison periods in the fall/early winter when there is no football at all. How about looking at cities by year when they had a NFL playoff team compared to years that they did not? I’m sure someone could figure this out with the appropriate crime data and years of football records.

The NFL: where having a really smart QB may be a bad thing

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Part of the NFL scouting combine circus is the Wonderlic test. Alabama’s Greg McElroy, scored 48 out of 50, quite a high score. There is one commentator who suggests this may be a bad thing:

McElroy’s brainpower still has the potential be taken as a negative around the league, as explained by Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio:

That said, scoring too high can be as much of a problem as scoring too low.  Football coaches want to command the locker room. Being smarter than the individual players makes that easier. Having a guy in the locker room who may be smarter than every member of the coaching staff can be viewed as a problem — or at a minimum as a threat to the egos of the men who hope to be able when necessary to outsmart the players, especially when trying in some way to manipulate them.

So while McElroy, who was unable to work out due to injury, may be really smart, he perhaps would have been wise to tank a few of the answers.

Wikipedia’s entry on this has a listing of average Wonderlic scores by NFL position according to a longtime NFL scribe. The average score for a quarterback is 24. It appears that McElroy’s score ranks amongst the highest known scores.

Football is known as having players who are warriors or gladiators. Even so, having a smart quarterback seems to me to be a good thing, rather than a negative because it might challenge the supremacy of the coach. With the complexity of offensive systems these days, particularly with the check-downs and need to read defensive coverages, a smart quarterback might help. This seems like a weird issue of masculinity: in a relatively violent sport, who gets to be smartest in the locker room?

There would be a way to possibly figure out whether this issue with the coach is real (granted that enough Wonderlic data is out there): how do Wonderlic scores compare with the number of coaches a quarterback has (and controlling for a bunch of other factors)? And more broadly, do higher Wonderlic scores translate into more victories?

High rate of arrests among NFL players?

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Going into the Super Bowl, everyone knows about the legal issues Ben Roethlisberger has faced in recent years. But one sociologist has found that behavior that breaks the law is not unknown to NFL players. One website suggests that sociologist Eric Carter found “nearly 35% of all players in the league have been arrested.” Elsewhere, Carter goes into more detail about why so many NFL players are arrested at some point and how religion could help players deal with anomie:

Eric has conducted over 100 interviews with NFL players, some who have led happy and well-adjusted lives but also with many who have not.  We talk about the typical pressures that a professional player faces, coming into sudden fame and fortune.  Prof. Carter brings the research ideas of Emile Durkheim, particulary “social anomie,” to bear on what a number of these athletes face when moving into the professional ranks.  The sudden change in lifestyle combined with intense pressures to perform often leave many of them unhappy, confused and susceptible to all sorts of deviant behavior (some of which makes the news).  We talk then about the role of religion in helping players cope with these changes.  Our discussion looks at what factors might help players make adjustments to their new environments, including: a religious upbringing; the support networks they have access to at college; and religious role models in the locker room.

More details about Carter’s study of NFL players can be found here. Although this is a small sample of 104 players (there are at least 1440 players in the NFL each year – 45 players on 32 rosters), Carter found that 33 of the players had been arrested (31.7%). And Carter wrote a book, Boys Gone Wild, based on his study.

What is interesting about this is that the NFL seems to avoid scrutiny in the public eye about this. Whereas baseball stars are vilified for cheating, NFL players are regularly arrested (if this arrest rate holds true across the NFL – and even if it was really 10-20% lower, it still is a decent number) and the popularity of the NFL has continued to grow. Even with players like Roethlisberger or Rae Carruth or Michael Vick or Ray Lewis or Donte Stallworth or Marvin Harrison getting into trouble, this sort of news gets overwhelmed by the behemoth that is NFL entertainment.

In a more recent interview, Carter talks about how the NFL is able to keep this information out of the public eye:

“We see a lot of what goes on, because of the media,” Carter said. “But I was amazed at how much goes on that isn’t picked up — how powerful the NFL is in combating some of the potential bad media. I couldn’t believe how many guys contemplated suicide or attempted it, or were that unhappy with their lives that they engaged in these self-destructive behaviors.”

Carter found that 32 percent of the players he interviewed had been arrested after they entered the league — and others said they often evaded arrest by dispensing autographs to star-struck police officers — and nearly half described themselves as unhappy people.

“Fifty percent? That’s a big number,” he said, especially when you consider that these are young men who make on average more than $1 million a year to play football, and many of them much more than that.

“It just goes against our contemporary American conceptions of what happiness is. They have it all. They have the wealth, the fame, the power, the status — all of those things that many people equate with a happy life.”

Perhaps the NFL is able to bury these stories or minimize them. Or perhaps the American public doesn’t want to face this kind of information or thinks the athletes are compensated enough and can deal with the problems on their own.

Quick Review: Da Bears!

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Partly to commemorate the Chicago Bears’ lone Super Bowl title and also to help mourn the recent loss to the Green Bay Packers, I read Da Bears!: How the 1985 Monsters of the Midway Became the Greatest Team in NFL History. A few thoughts about this book, one of many products commemorating this 25th anniversary:

1. A main theme of the book is the ongoing battle between Head Coach Mike Ditka and defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan. How exactly the team kept moving forward with this kind of tension is interesting.

2. There are claims that the Bears were the team that really helped push the NFL to the top. With their winning plus the actions and charm of their players, the Bears were a kind of media circus in an era where this didn’t happen often.

2a. The problem with a claim like this is that little evidence is presented that might conflict with this narrative. At one point, the book mentions that several teams had recorded songs as teams before the “Super Bowl Shuffle” but it was this 1985 song that really took off. Another (implicit?) claim is that the Bears really pushed athlete endorsements forward. Were other star athletes not doing commercials? In the end, how exactly do we know the Bears were something different in the eyes of the media compared to any other team of the time? I would have liked to have read more perspectives from outside of Chicago – were people across the country as intrigued with the Bears as Chicagoans were?

3. Some things never seem to change with the Bears: defense over offense, inconsistent quarterback play, complaints about the McCaskeys, an inability to follow up on success (with the 1985 Super Bowl team never getting back to another title game), fickle fans who suddenly were worried at the end of the 1985 season with less than perfect play, and more. How long can a team have the same basic identity?

4. As a cultural phenomenon, it would be interesting to track other teams that have captured the heart of a city in the same way as the Bears. While the list of endorsements and radio shows during the 1985 season was impressive, many of those guys are still around in the Chicago media. Will there be a point where the 1985 team is eclipsed by another team or was their combination of dominance and style too much to overcome?

5. It was unclear to me how much of this book was original research versus drawing from existing sources.

Overall, I’m not sure how much new material this book presents: many of the themes are widely known. There are a wide range of perspectives in this book but I think you also find this information elsewhere. I was looking for a new take on a famous team and yet you will hear the same things on local sports talk stations and other media.

Can the NFL over-hype itself?

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As the NFC and AFC title games slowly approach, I wonder: can the NFL over-hype its product?

On one hand, it appears not. NFL television ratings have been excellent this year (regular season stats here). The league has a number of stars that draw a wide range of attention, from the good (Tom Brady, Peyton Manning) to the bad (Brett Favre, Michael Vick’s sage in recent years). Particularly at this time of year, talk about the NFL dominates the airwaves – a number of other sports are mid-season. The final four teams remaining in the playoffs are historic franchises that have passionate fan bases. Even with Bill Simmon’s recent claim that there is “there’s at least one great [NBA] game” each night, other sports can’t match the popularity of the NFL. The NFL even thinks it can sell $200 tickets for a “party plaza” outside of the Super Bowl.

On the other hand, it is A LOT of talk. In the weeks between playoff games, it seems that ESPN can’t stop talking about the next match-ups. In Chicago, everyone has been talking Bears-Packers. The teams already have played twice so how much more is there to discuss? Could it get to the point where fans tune out the week before and are just happy to get the game over with? And interestingly, it only gets worse for the Super Bowl: then we get the infamous “Media Day.” Though the Super Bowl gets tremendous ratings, how often does the game match the hype? In my lifetime of watching Super Bowls, I distinctly remember being disappointed by most of them. (A couple stand out in memory: the Giants-Bills match-up in 1991, Rams and Titans in 2000, the Bears-Colts in 2007, Patriots-Giants in 2008, Steelers-Cardinals in 2009.)

From a broader perspective, there is no guarantee that the popularity of the NFL will be maintained over the years, let alone continue to increase. (Gregg Easterbrook, ESPN’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback, points this out.) The first non-sports comparison that comes to mind are presidential elections. Yesterday, the New York Times reported how President Obama is getting his next campaign in order and plans to formally declare his candidacy in two months. From now until November 2012, this is what we will hear about in the news: who will challenge Obama, how much money will be raised, what are the issues, who has the best image, what do the latest polls say, etc. Don’t voters, at least some of them, get burned out by all of this by the time the actual election takes place? The idea that some countries have of holding more defined election seasons, typically announced by the current leader and lasting for a few months, seems preferable to this endless, over-hyped presidential election season.

I am sure someone has done research on over-hyping. For the NFL, the question is when will it saturate its market. Of course, one way around this is to expand your market and head overseas. (They are trying to do this with games in Toronto, London, and Mexico City in recent years. But the NBA is way ahead of them.) In the meantime, the sporting public will get heavy doses of talk, analysis, and replays. I, for one, will be very happy when it finally gets to 2 PM Sunday afternoon and we can actually see whether the Bears and Packers will win.

Study about drunk fans has a limited sample

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A recently released study suggests that 8 percent of fans leave sporting events drunk. This may be an interesting finding – but the newspaper description of the sample suggests there may be issues:

University of Minnesota researchers tested the blood alcohol content of 362 people to see how much folks drink when they go to professional baseball and football games. In their study, released Tuesday, they determined that 40 percent of the participants had some alcohol in their system and 8 percent were drunk, meaning their blood alcohol content was .08 or higher.

“Given the number of attendees at these sporting events, we can be talking about thousands of people leaving a professional sporting event who are legally intoxicated,” lead author Darin Erickson said. The study did not address what percentage, if any, of those fans intended to drive.

To collect the data, research staff waited outside 13 Major League Baseball and three National Football League games and randomly approached fans as they left. Those who consented took a breath test and answered questions about when, where and how much they drank on game day.

So the researchers waited outside 16 sporting events. Across these 16 events, the researchers performed voluntary tests on 362 people. This averages out to 22.625 fans per event.

Let’s say the events average at least 30,000 fans – not an unreasonable expectation for MLB and NFL games. If they tested about 23 fans at each event, that is less than 1 percent of each fans at each game. How could these findings be considered generalizable? First, you would need to test more fans. Second, could there be something different about the fans who were willing to volunteer for this test after a game?

Another report on this study bumps the sample number up a bit to 382 people. This doesn’t change the averages too much. Also, this may be the first study to examine the particular phenomenon of drinking at sporting events. However, the sample still seems to be too small even as the research study is going to be published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

Quick Review: NFL Unplugged

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With the  NFL season winding down and games taking on more importance, NFL Unplugged: The Brutal, Brilliant World of Professional Football offered me some new insights into professional football. A few thoughts about this new book:

1. Anthony Gargano suggests much of the game depends on what happens in the trenches with the offensive and defensive lines. This is not a new thought – John Madden pointed this out for years – but it rarely comes out in broadcasts or video games where quarterbacks, running backs, and wide receivers get a lot of attention. These linemen have a hard job: for less respect than teammates, they beat each other up play after play.

1a. I wondered while reading this about how much Gargano’s perspective was shaped by the players he has talked with during the years. While he shared information from players of all positions, he seemed to have closer relationships with some of the players in the trenches.

1b. Gargano seems to like playing up this warrior perspective.

1c. This reminds me of the different color commentary one hears depending on whether the commentator was a quarterback or lineman. Linemen, in particular, seem to see the game in a completely different way and tend to emphasize blocking and who is “getting a push” at the line.

1d. Do many fans have a skewed perspective because of playing Madden football and controlling the guy with the ball (usually the quarterback)? In a video game, the player doesn’t get any sense of the physical nature of football – it essentially becomes a game of X’s and O’s and putting the ball in the right holes or hands. Some years ago, Madden included a blocking feature where the player could control a lineman or other blocker rather than the ball handler. Does anyone ever use this feature?

2. Players have to amp themselves up to even play. Many have nerves, to the point of throwing up repeatedly before the game, and most have to get themselves into a mental state where they would be willing to throw their body into other people for 60 minutes. Gargano describes this mental state as something like “the dark side” that many players try to reach.

3. Even with all of the money they players make, there is no doubt that it takes a toll on their bodies. In our world of white-collar, management, and technology jobs, football players stick out as celebrated workers who put their bodies on the line. One of the classic examples Gargano talks about repeatedly is what happens in the piles when the football has come loose. Most football plans have some clue of what goes on in the piles but Gargano talks about screaming and particularly dirty tactics.

4. Do football broadcasters and commentators have some sort of unwritten rule about not mentioning or talking about the physical nature of football? Many of the commentators tend to focus on the glamorous parts – the quarterback with the perfect throw, the receiver with a great catch, etc. But if so many broadcasters today have played football themselves, why don’t they offer more insights int this? Do they think viewers don’t want to hear this? Americans seem to like football because it is violent – but is there a limit to how much violence people actually want to hear about?

5. There was not a whole lot of insights into actual tactics or strategies during the game. More time is spent talking about the schedule of football players: what happens during the week and then what happens on game days.

Overall, an interesting book that mainly talks about players’ preparation and recovery. Many of the insights have been offered elsewhere but this book is quite vivid in offering a perspective that is often buried or downplayed.

SI cover story on Vick says “You can’t turn away”

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The story of Michael Vick seems to bring out the passions of sports fans. For those who love stories of second chances, Vick is a great example – a guy who didn’t play up to his full talent in Atlanta, ran into trouble, but now is playing great and seems to have turned the corner. For those who love dogs or think NFL players (and athletes in general) get too many breaks, Vick is a perfect example: just because he is a possible MVP candidate, Vick gets a free pass for his bad behavior.

The recent cover story in Sports Illustrated explains the situation:

The Vick paradox is simple: You can’t look away from the beauty, and you can’t quite forget the brutality. His game is rivetingly kinetic, and now that Vick’s commitment to football is making itself evident, it’s impossible not to wonder how good he can be. Yet his infamous stewardship of the Bad Newz Kennels created a discomfort that has endured longer than the usual distaste for bad actors. On Thursday, Goodell stopped in Philadelphia and, 14 months after he lifted Vick’s playing ban, spoke of the “message” behind Vick’s rebound, the “lessons” to be learned. “We need our kids to see that kind of success story,” Goodell told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “This young man has turned his life around, and he’s going to contribute.” But Vick’s tale is not that tidy, and it’s far from finished.

For some, Vick might never be able to make up for what he did. But if he proves himself to be a winning and successful NFL quarterback, many will look past his transgressions. And along the way, he is likely to get paid handsomely in salary for his efforts.

More broadly, Vick’s situation raises all sorts of sociological issues: should athletes get a second chance? Should anyone who mistreated dogs in the way he did get a second chance? Can jail time rehabilitate people or are they tainted forever? Can Vick become a hero or role model in the future? If Vick can’t be redeemed in the eyes of most Americans, who can?

American sports leagues eye $155 million income for sponsorships on uniforms

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It was recently reported that English Premier League teams earn about $155 million a year from the sponsorships on their uniforms. How much longer before American sports leagues follow suit and try to benefit from such a ready-made revenue stream?

How large is too large for football?

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The NFL has some large players, particularly on the offensive line where it seems like all the linemen are at least 6’3″ and 300 pounds.The game has evolved from one with fairly normal people to one where players have to be behemoths or physical specimens at each position.

Mississippi walk-on lineman Terrell Brown is even bigger: 6’11” and 390 pounds. This is huge, massive. A couple thoughts:

1. Can one even be a good football player at this size? I imagine if he locked up with a defensive player, Brown could win on size alone. But how difficult is it to move all that weight? I could imagine some smaller defense players could make it difficult as they run around him.

2. Can one remain healthy while playing at this size? Linemen take a beating and it seems like tall athletes, like Yao Ming, have special issues.

3. What will his future life be like if football doesn’t work out? Offensive linemen bulk up quite a bit to play football but this is not the weight one would want to stay at for a lifetime.

Brown has a long way to go before these questions are answered – he is just a walk-on who apparently played at a community college and is not listed on recruiting sites. I’d be curious to see how his football future plays out.