Post by abbey1227 on Dec 14, 2023 2:06:20 GMT
The Cool Down
Study identifies surprising culprit behind the poor performance of some NFL teams: ‘The evidence is piling up’
Laurelle Stelle Wed, December 13, 2023 at 4:45 AM CST·2 min read
The amount of air pollution in an athlete’s city has a measurable effect on their performance, according to a study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Researchers from two Louisiana universities recently collected data on two high-level team sports: Major League Baseball (MLB) and the NFL. They then compared those stats to the air quality index for each team’s home city.
Their analysis, published in January, shows that baseball teams commit an extra 0.000993 errors per game for every additional air quality index point, while quarterbacks can expect a 0.23-point dip in their QB rating, an all-around stat for measuring on-field performance.
This study is the latest in a series of recent papers examining the effects of air quality on athletics. Another study published this year found that air pollution impacts running speed, while one conducted in 2017 linked air quality to the number of passes that soccer players made.
In this case, researchers accounted for other factors that might affect performance, like the team’s budget.
Francis Pope, a University of Birmingham professor of atmospheric studies, told The Daily Beast that this data is about more than just the heart and lungs — pollution also affects the brain. Unlike a sport like track in which the athlete is constantly moving, baseball and football are played in short bursts, so errors can easily occur due to failures in judgment.
“Certainly the evidence is piling up,” he told the outlet, “that pollution does appear to have an effect on the cognitive impacts of people, both in the short term and, via increased rates of diseases like Alzheimer’s, the long term.”
Study co-author Jeremy Foreman stressed to the Daily Beast that air quality isn’t the only factor that can affect an athlete’s performance.
“It doesn’t mean that a high-performing quarterback is going to all of a sudden be awful because he’s playing in a certain city,” he said. “But how much better could you be if there was better air?”
Study identifies surprising culprit behind the poor performance of some NFL teams: ‘The evidence is piling up’
Laurelle Stelle Wed, December 13, 2023 at 4:45 AM CST·2 min read
The amount of air pollution in an athlete’s city has a measurable effect on their performance, according to a study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Researchers from two Louisiana universities recently collected data on two high-level team sports: Major League Baseball (MLB) and the NFL. They then compared those stats to the air quality index for each team’s home city.
Their analysis, published in January, shows that baseball teams commit an extra 0.000993 errors per game for every additional air quality index point, while quarterbacks can expect a 0.23-point dip in their QB rating, an all-around stat for measuring on-field performance.
This study is the latest in a series of recent papers examining the effects of air quality on athletics. Another study published this year found that air pollution impacts running speed, while one conducted in 2017 linked air quality to the number of passes that soccer players made.
In this case, researchers accounted for other factors that might affect performance, like the team’s budget.
Francis Pope, a University of Birmingham professor of atmospheric studies, told The Daily Beast that this data is about more than just the heart and lungs — pollution also affects the brain. Unlike a sport like track in which the athlete is constantly moving, baseball and football are played in short bursts, so errors can easily occur due to failures in judgment.
“Certainly the evidence is piling up,” he told the outlet, “that pollution does appear to have an effect on the cognitive impacts of people, both in the short term and, via increased rates of diseases like Alzheimer’s, the long term.”
Study co-author Jeremy Foreman stressed to the Daily Beast that air quality isn’t the only factor that can affect an athlete’s performance.
“It doesn’t mean that a high-performing quarterback is going to all of a sudden be awful because he’s playing in a certain city,” he said. “But how much better could you be if there was better air?”
comments:
21 July, 2023
Correlation is not causation.
Higher levels of pollutants are also correlated with more traffic on the roads. Perhaps the lifestyles that these athletes must adjust to has more to do with their negative performance than the minute differences in pollution.
Perhaps these cities are difficult to live in for psychological reasons and so it's harder to perform well with low grade constant irritation.
I'm not saying these things are true. I'm just saying there is no way this study can adequately account for such minute levels of performance difference as being caused by pollution, when there could be a multitude of correlating factors that also play a roll.
Correlation is not causation.
Higher levels of pollutants are also correlated with more traffic on the roads. Perhaps the lifestyles that these athletes must adjust to has more to do with their negative performance than the minute differences in pollution.
Perhaps these cities are difficult to live in for psychological reasons and so it's harder to perform well with low grade constant irritation.
I'm not saying these things are true. I'm just saying there is no way this study can adequately account for such minute levels of performance difference as being caused by pollution, when there could be a multitude of correlating factors that also play a roll.
21 July, 2023
The wording of this study is concerning, I would be interested in knowing the P value and if the results are statistically significant. The other issue is they use the metric of errors in baseball but the metric of QB rating in football. It leads you to believe that runs scored in baseball and points scored in football shows no positive correlation to their hypothesis, that they were farming for a stat that would support their claim. Like an extra 0.000993 errors per game for every additional air quality index point would mean it would take 1,008 games or 6.2 years for one addition error over a team with an AQI difference of 1, also AQI changes per day so how do they account for the constant fluctuation. It doesn't pass the smell test for being statistically significant especially since there are an infinite number of other variables at play.
21 July, 2023
It would be very difficult to isolate this single variable, making the conclusion highly skeptical.
21 July, 2023
Do the math on this. 0.000993 additional errors per game means that, if you play every game in a 162-game season in bad air quality, that’s one additional error every 7-8 years. This is a significant overstatement.
![[shrug]](http://storage.proboards.com/6870873/images/GNdzQKpfkkHBBwUPdCiE.gif)
