NFL Team Losing? Air Quality Could Be Partly to Blame, Study Says
The quality of the air we breathe can have quite an impact on our short-term and long-term health. As air pollution becomes more common, scientists have noticed how poor air quality can affect every part of people's lives. A recent study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found how it can have an impact on the football field or baseball diamond.
Researchers from two Louisiana universities collected stats from the MLB and NFL and compared them with the air quality index in each team's home city. They discovered that baseball teams commit an extra 0.000993 errors per game for every additional air quality index point, while quarterbacks experienced an approximately 0.23-point dip in their QB rating.
In the end, teams and players based in cities with worse air quality performed at a lower level and made more errors, threw more interceptions, and made other gameplay mistakes. Because air pollution affects the brain just as much as the body, it's possible that athletes in cities with worse air quality can't think as quickly when making split-second decisions in games like football and baseball.
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It's the latest research to support the idea that poor air quality can have a negative effect on athletes' performance. One study published earlier this year concluded that air pollution reduces running speed, while a 2017 study found a connection between air quality and the number of passes that soccer players made.
"Whether you’re looking at a one-year snapshot of performance, or over the course of a career, it appears that based on our sample, [bad air quality] does negatively affect performance," study co-author Jeremy Foreman told The Daily Beast.
Still, air quality is far from the only factor in whether or not an athlete has a bad day on the field. "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?"
In a post-pandemic era filled with pollution, it may be more important than ever for indoor stadiums to have proper air filtration systems.