What does it take to be dominant in the world of sports? Well, the short answer seems to be money and steroids, but of course other factors exist (HGH, being scheduled against the Knicks, etc). But you just try telling that to those teams of researchers who occasionally pop up attempting to correlate wins and losses with uniform color.
One such study was conducted during the 2004 Olympics, with a focus on the judo competition, essentially concluding that athletes wearing blue robes had a sporting advantage over their counterparts decked out in white. Blue, the logic goes, is bolder and meaner looking than white, thus somehow psyching out all the lily-clad pansy boys. Blue, apparently, is the new red.
This effect has been known about for quite some time -- a 1998 paper by University of Utah researchers Berhardt et al. demonstrated that beyond its effects on mood and self esteem, watching your team win not only boosts your testosterone level, but also decreases the levels of circulating testosterone in the fans of the losing team.
Football games do funny things to people. Everyone knows that to some degree--I remember a distinct urge to roll an SUV and light things on fire when my Texas Longhorns won the Rose Bowl in 2006--but apparently no one has studied it. Until now.
Assaults increase by about 9% when a community hosts a college game, vandalism spikes by about 18%, and DUIs increase by about 13%, reports a new working paper by Daniel I. Rees, an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado Denver, and Kevin T. Schnepel, a graduate student in the economics program. It's even worse when there's an upset. An upset at home brings 112% increase in assaults and a 61% increase in vandalism.
Every week, the Anti-Scientist picks a study or news report that was stillborn from the start. Then he resurrects it and makes it do a jolly dance!
How gay are American football players?
Eric Anderson of the University of Bath, Center for the Tedious Verification of the Self-Evident, has determined that college-level male cheerleaders who played football in high school, are likely to have engaged in “acts intended to sexually arouse other men.”
This is news how? Still, we have it, the neon factoid, nineteen of forty-seven footballers sampled “had sexual relations with men.”
