Friday, January 18, 2008

Sports make you do dumb things

There's a paper out there with the following conclusions:

...we find that college football games are associated with sharp increases in crime. For instance, assaults increase by about 9% when a community hosts a college football game, vandalism increases by about 18%, and DUIs increase by about 13%. We also find evidence that upsets result in larger increases in crime than games that do not produce an upset. For instance, an upset loss at home is associated with a 112% increase in assaults and a 61% increase in vandalism. We discuss these results in the context of psychological theories of fan aggression.

There is no additional information on whether this varies by conference, or whether they accounted for the fact that most Ohio State fans are in jail to begin with.

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