The last play of Tom Brady’s career was a bad one. For a guy who became GOAT by being obnoxiously perfect, a throw far beyond the reach of the Tampa Bay Julio Jones wide receiver is a terrible way to get out. Perhaps the last five months have caught up to Brady or he’s had a psychological test ahead of an NFL season in which he allegedly gave up his marriage to get in. But a group of academics from two Louisiana universities recently published a paper pointing to another culprit: air pollution.
There is a lot of evidence that air quality affects the performance of solo athletes—one recent research found that even a small amount of air pollution equated to slower time for college track and field athletes. The researchers also looked at soccer players, finding that when the players were exposed to the air worse, they make fewer passes and not only run less, but play with less intensity. But the new peer-reviewed study is scientists’ first attempt to see how air pollution affects professional athletes in major North American sports—baseball and soccer. football.
And what the researchers found is consistent with previous studies: teams and players in cities with worse air quality make more mistakes, throw more interceptions, and make mistakes. Another costly mistake and usually done only at a lower level.
“Whether you’re looking at a snapshot of performance over a year or over a career, based on our sample, it looks like it,” said Jeremy Foreman, an associate professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. negatively affect performance. a co-author of the study, told The Daily Beast.
Give learnpublished in the January issue of the magazine International journal of environmental research and public healthThe researchers compiled two datasets: one of all the errors that occurred in the Major League between 1999 and 2020, and another of interceptions thrown and rated. quarterback for each NFL quarterback from 2006 to 2021. They then compared those numbers with data from the agency’s Environmental Protection Agency. Air Quality Indexmeasures pollutants such as carbon monoxide and microscopic amounts of matter and liquids known as particulate matter on a scale of 0 (little or no risk) to 500 (everyone exposed to danger) ).
The researchers took into account a number of variables—for example, they worked on the assumption that the more wages a baseball team spends, the fewer mistakes that team can make. Likewise, an NFL quarterback with more years of experience will make fewer mistakes than a rookie and will therefore have a higher quarterback rating.
“Whether you’re looking at a snapshot of performance over a year or across a career, based on our sample it looks like it’s negatively impacting performance“
— Jeremy Foreman, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
What they discovered was that performance differences due to air quality were small for individual incidents, but could lead to serious problems over the course of a season. Each one point increase in AQI is associated with an additional 0.000993 errors per game. The Arizona Diamondbacks playing in Phoenix, the city with the worst air quality in the MLB, will have to commit 10 more fouls over the course of a season.
On the football side of things, each increase in AQI score means a 0.230 decrease in the QB rating, a statistic that combines passes, completions, touches, intercepts and total yards for an overall look. on quarterback performance. So, a quarterback playing for the Arizona Cardinals, who also suffered from terrible air west of Phoenix in Glendale, would see a 15.4-point drop in QBR (and would also have a 1.27% higher interception rate than that. compared to when they were playing in a city where the air quality was the NFL average).
The results also show that exposure to bad air not only affects athletes in the short term, but can also lead to a cumulative decline in performance over time. For example, researchers have observed that the more time a quarterback spends playing in more polluted locations throughout their year, the more likely their performance will be affected.
Tom Brady is the best quarterback to ever play the game — but even he may not be immune to the negative effects of poor air quality.
Nathan Ray Seebeck-USA TODAY Sports / Profile photo
While previous studies have shown that pollutants in the air can affect athletes participating in high-intensity sports such as cardio. marathon runners, new research shows that even in sports where the action is brief, player performance suffers. Mistakes in both football and baseball are more often due to misjudgment than physical limitations—and so if air pollution plays any role, it is the pollutants. Not only does it affect body systems like the lungs, but it can also impair cognitive function, Francis Pope, professor of atmospheric studies at the University of Birmingham, told The Daily Beast..
“The cognitive aspect has really begun to be understood in the last few years, but the mechanism is still not very well understood,” he said. “But there’s certainly growing evidence that pollution seems to have an effect on people’s cognitive effects, both in the short term and in the long term through increased rates of diseases like Alzheimer’s.”
According to Michael Koehle, a professor of sports medicine at the University of British Columbia, the study’s conclusions are largely consistent with what is known about air quality, but the analysis does not take into account how different pollutants affect the air quality. different effects on the human body.
“They don’t look at individual pollutants, they just look at overall air pollution,” he told The Daily Beast.. “So someday, or somewhere, maybe the ozone layer is really bad, and in other places, there could be a lot of particles in the air, or nitrous oxide or something like that. . And they will all have slightly different effects. For example, it’s hard to say exactly how a midfielder like Brady could misjudge a pass.
Koehle added: “Carbon monoxide, a pollutant, has been clearly shown to affect cognition, which will work by interfering with the body’s ability to deliver oxygen to the brain. “While something like nitrous oxide, there is a recent study that has just come out look at functional MRI, and they showed changes in brain function or brain interaction in response to that.”
Despite the limitations of the paper, it is clear that air pollution cannot be good for human health—physically or cognitively, whether during a sports match or any other activity.. However, that doesn’t mean Foreman is planning on doing research to get an edge on how to bet on the Super Bowl this Sunday. (For those looking for an edge in their bets, the air quality in Kansas City and Philadelphia is roughly the same.)
Instead, Foreman emphasized that the data will give fans an opportunity to think about what their city’s environment is costing them—if not their own health, rather than their own. chance to watch their favorite team play to the best of their ability.
“It doesn’t mean that a high-performing midfielder will suddenly go bad because he’s playing in a certain city. If you are a midfielder and Andy Reid is your coach, and you have a great attacking line, everything is likely to be fine, no matter the air quality. And if you’re Patrick Mahomes and very talented, even better,” he said. “But how much better would you be with fresher air?”
