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Science Has News About Football and Wife Beaters

Nah, there's no joke here. Just shitty human beings. Human beings that beat their spouses with increased frequency in relation to NFL outcomes. That's right, a new study from the National Institutes of Health reports that men are more likely to...

Nah, there’s no joke here. Just shitty human beings. Human beings that beat their spouses with increased frequency in relation to NFL outcomes. That’s right, a new study published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics reports that men are more likely to beat their wives in the event of an NFL upset. Their team loses and that’s how they react.

The methodology is kinda amazing. From 1996 to 2004, the researchers looked at domestic violence stats within general fan regions of six NFL teams. Note that we’re not just talking loses, but upsets. They looked at the Vegas odds of this or that team winning and, when those odds were upset, they found a 10-percent increase. Importantly, the increase was limited to the period spanning the final hour of a game to two hours after.

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But they go deeper. If the team lost to a “traditional rival” domestic violence reports shot up to a 20-percent increase, versus 8-percent for a non-rival. If the team was in playoff contention, or sucked really bad—“suffering four or more sacks or turnovers or losing 80 or more yards to penalties”—the spike was even worse.

So, I guess this is obligatory: I hope the NFL never comes back, is totally destroyed by the strike. For so many reasons really, but there’s this.

And I know everyone is thinking about the same thing right now, and the NIH researchers aren’t that dumb. “This is not limited to football,” the study’s co-author David Card says. “Someone who gets a speeding ticket on the way home, for example, might also be more likely to act out in a way he would later regret.” This is less about the NFL than awful people being awful.

The world is sick.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.