Women Suffer for NFL Losses

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Medical News: Women Suffer for NFL Losses - in Primary Care, Domestic Violence from MedPage Today

"Violence against women spikes after the home pro football team suffers an upset, researchers say.

Female brutality increases about 10% when an anticipated home team win turns into a loss -- similar to rises seen on nice days, and close to those seen on holidays, David Card, PhD, and Gordon Dahl, PhD, of the National Institutes of Health, reported in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Studies have suggested various health impacts linked with the outcomes of football games. For instance, Super Bowl losses may be tied to heart attacks, especially among older fans, according to a recent study in Clinical Cardiology.

The present study looked at family violence data from more than 750 city and county police agencies in the National Incident-Based Reporting System. These data were compared with information on National Football League (NFL) games played on Sundays by six teams over a 12-year period.

The researchers estimated a set of Poisson models on all days of the year for the six states in the sample and controlled for pregame point spread and the size of the local TV viewing audience.

They found that after games in which the home team was predicted to win by four or more points, but ended up losing, there was a 10% increase in the rate of at-home violence by men against their wives and girlfriends.

This is comparable to the effects of a hot day, and is about a third of the typical rise in violence associated with a holiday such as Memorial Day or Independence Day, Card and Dahl wrote."