Does the NFL Have a Problem with Player Violence?

Matt McGowan: Welcome to Short Talks from the Hill, a research podcast of the University of Arkansas.  My name is Matt McGowan. I’m a science writer here at the university.

Jacquelyn Wiersma-Mosley is a professor of human development and family sciences at the University of Arkansas and the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. Her research focuses on violence against women, including risk factors for victimization among marginalized populations and understanding men’s sexual assault perpetration. Recently she and undergraduate student Krystyna Gotberg published a study about violence in the National Football League and how the NFL addresses these offenses. Here, of course we’re talking about violence away from the game itself.

Jacquelyn Wiersma-Mosley

Welcome, Jackie, thank you for being here.

Jacquelyn Wiersma-Mosley: Thank you for having me, Matt.

MM: You’ve done a study looking at the problem of violence in the NFL, and I think it’s fair to say that the average American sports enthusiast paying attention to professional sports recognizes that there is a problem with violence, player violence outside or off the field. Would you say that’s accurate?

JWM: Yeah, definitely, and I really think even if a sports enthusiastic fan would think, even the NFL has maybe more problems than the than, say, other sports like the NBA or hockey or baseball. You just don’t hear or see a lot of stories. I’m not saying it’s not going on, and maybe you know that’s an issue with journalism, but I think with the NFL, we’ve seen the stories… I think what really set it apart from other sports was the Ray Rice incident. And if you think about that, just hearing about the story, people really didn’t think much about it, but it was when there was a video that was released, and there are some cases where videos are released or pictures, when you see the victim, and I think that’s powerful these days. It’s social media and, obviously, really, well, journalism is helping us see it, so we know it’s out there. I just always wonder, okay, we know the NFL has an issue. Does anyone care?

MM: You decided to look at the problem. Why did you do that? What motivated you to do this study?

JWM: Well, lots of reasons, I think. First, I mean I’m a huge NFL fan. I love football. Ever since I was little. I’ll just put it on the record. I am a Green Bay Packers fan, but I play fantasy football also for the last 15 years. I mean, I’m really into the NFL, more so than college sports. I mean, I even own stock of the Packers, so, if you ask any student who’s ever had my course for the last 10 years, they know I’m a Packers fan. It was definitely something I talked about in class. I put it on my exams as a bonus question. So I’ve just been a huge Packers fan and NFL fan, since I was little and you know it, it really did bother me reading all these stories and learning about these incidences of violence against women and just any type of behavior that’s violent with these players. And then when I really started studying this topic of violence against women and getting really passionate about it, and finding that it’s a huge probable problem in the U.S. and really, all over the globe and wondering if anyone even cared about it… So that’s where I struggled with is, you know, I’m… during the week, studying this problem, trying to understand the factors related to it, and how high their rates are, and then on the weekends I’m promoting the NFL and playing fantasy football, and I was aware enough to know that I would never draft a player in my league that had an incidence of violence against women. So I was very aware that I was like, oh, that person… domestic violence last year, I’m not going to pick him up. And so my list was dwindling down very quickly, and then people would joke with me, like you’re not going to have a very good team if you start doing that, and so I was just struggling with sort of what to do. And I thought at the same time, with all the research that I’m doing that was archival, right, it was publicly available data, which I think is a kind of a new way to come… to study a problem. I thought what if I could do this with NFL data? And so I met an undergrad student who wasn’t an honor suited, really didn’t want to go to grad school, but heard me talk as a guest speaker in a class, and I told her all about my work, and she said, you know, ‘I’d love to do research with you,’ and so I had different projects at the time, but I asked her well, what do you think about the NFL? I kind of laid out the project, and it would be a lot of data collection, but honestly I wasn’t sure I would have time for her, and she was on board and so she ran with it. I gave her sort of a A-list to do, of how to track down these players and wanted her to start with 2010 just to kind of go back before the Ray Rice, which was around 2014, so I kind of wanted to look at before, and then do… just really this recent decade because I think it was more doable than looking way back. So like 20 years ago I think would just be too much. And so we sort of planned out this project and it just went from there.

MM: So, the study yielded some interesting results. Can you tell us what you found?

JWM: Yeah, so I think the first thing that I think was good news and surprising to me is when we got the 176 players, I looked at the… but across the league, and that only represents about 10% of players… I think there’s over 1,700 players in the league. So we found an average of 2.85 games in suspension for that 176, so that’s interesting. And so then we looked at the number of cases by those four categories, and so there were 24 players who had minor infractions, there were 25 players who had incidences of violence against women. And then when we found drug-related offenses or incidences, there were over 57, and I would say most of those were probably the PEDs that we hear about all the time. And general violent behaviors, things like assault and battery, not specific to women, was over 70. And so that was really surprising because I thought, okay, violence against women in the NFL for the 9 to 10 year period only accounted for 14% of player violations. So it wasn’t as high as I thought it would be. And so I think that was really good news for me. And then the fact that 40% of the violations were violent, general violence, really did surprise me, because I don’t feel like we read that in the news or hear about that as much. You know, assault and battery. I mean, I just… that wasn’t something I thought of with the NFL. Then we wanted to look at the type of violation, and which gets more suspended, because my sort of hypothesis was that the NFL cares more about PEDs, right, versus violence against women. So I want to see, I wanted to test to see if they were actually suspending players for doing these really, really awful things. And we did find some differences. First, for violence against women incidences, on average, there were four- game suspensions. So that that’s somewhat good, right? We’re holding players accountable, four games out of 16 games is a lot for their season. But if you read the NFL policy regarding any type of violence towards women or really violent acts, it’s six games minimum. So, that was a huge ding ding ding. Okay, you’re saying you’re going to, you know, suspend the players six games if they’re have these off the field incidences like this, and you’re only suspending them on average about four games. And I feel like a devil’s advocate, which I’ve heard… is, well, they don’t really know, you’re innocent until proven guilty, right, and so it has to go through a court and all that but if you read the NFL policy, it’s very loose and it’s really based on the coach or the league’s interpretation, doesn’t say anything about that. That there has to be an actual, you know, a law or, sorrty, a rule that finds that the person is found guilty, right? There’s no term in that. It’s really their interpretation, so it’s very loosey, and they’re not really holding their players accountable like they say they will and that policy. And then, for violent offenses, we found that just under two game suspension on average for players who were involved in violent incidences, which seems pretty low, and then for drug offenses like PEDs and alcohol and drugs and DUI’s, that was four games on average. And then for minor infractions like missing a team meeting was two games, so it was really interesting to sort of look at these different numbers and that really players are being held accountable in the NFL, well, four games against women around four games and for PEDs, but not so much violent behaviors like burglary, assault. That’s only two games, which is to them the same thing as missing a meeting, right? So when you compare them, so that… I think that was sort of the major things that we found and really surprising for me that that is not at all what I suspected when I was started this project, so completely surprised me.

MM: What are the implications of this work? There clearly there are some pieces of it that the league could use and learn from and benefit from, but I guess I’m even more interested in what the implications for just society at large, sort of broader implications of violence against women in our society and culture. What are some of the broader implications of this study outside of the NFL?

JWM: Well, that’s the $1,000,000 question. When your viewers read this article that was sort of the thing they left me with too is why should the NFL care about violence against women? In some ways, and it’s a great question. And one I struggle with because almost all societies all across the globe tolerate violence against women. They let perpetrators go unpunished. We have statistics to back that up. But it does spill over to the workplace, and in the NFL and our employment, and it does affect our finances. So I started thinking maybe that’s the way to connect to the NFL, it’s a billion-dollar industry, is that it can affect a player’s… obviously how well they play if they’re thinking about things off field, their attendance, their safety, it affects publicity, right? So I think the NFL, if it would try to address these things and doing lots of different things, more so than what they are sort of putting their money where their mouth is because I think for some ways they’re just oh, we did this one little tiny thing, and there’s been a lot of stories on that, like, oh, we donated a little bit of money here when they have a billion dollars, things like that, but really supporting their players and supporting victims and not profits and again, putting their money where their mouth mouth is I think would benefit them as an NFL organization and help them continue to make lots and lots of money, which I know is the big reason why the NFL is there right? But I really think after doing this study, the thing that I think I’m most grateful for is the journalists who you go out… and maybe it’s a player that no one really cares about and they had this incident. But the fact that they put it out there in the news, that’s how we learn about these things, that’s how we read about it, that’s more data, right, that we have because obviously the NFL is not publishing any data out there, so they’re making these incidences public, which helps us. As people understand that it’s happening, awareness, I do worry again that people don’t care, don’t get it about violence against women. Based on my research that I’ve seen and that I do think it’s a social justice issue that doesn’t get talked about enough. And I love this really great quote by Will Smith. He related it to racism, which is very relevant, but he said, ‘violence against women isn’t really changing, hasn’t changed over the past few years. What’s happening is it’s now being filmed, right? And so I think with those incidences, with Ray Rice and other players, it tries to show people that it’s not just this number, it’s not this stranger when you actually show a photo or video, it creates more empathy for people to be like, oh, this is really happening, I’m seeing it now, right? Because I think people don’t want to believe their favorite player does these things. I sure don’t, right? As as an NFL fan, we don’t want to believe that this could happen. But I think when we see the things, we believe it more, and so I really think journalism has helped us with that in the last few years and I hope it continues to. But I also think the majority of men are not violent and I think that needs to be said over and over. Our research shows that the majority of men don’t perpetrate violence towards women, either sexually or physically. The majority do not, but when men are silent, especially like players in the league, the majority players and the NFL as sort of administration, when they are silent, it sort of allows this to go unnoticed, unchecked, right? And I think that there’s a lot of programs out there where specific to men and specific to athletes where it sort of uses their voices as allies with women, right? That they speak out, and they say this is wrong and that’s what we need is more men saying violence against women is wrong.

MM: Music for Short Talks from the Hill was written and performed by local musician Ben Harris. For more information and additional podcasts, visit Arkansas Research. That’s arkansasresearch.uark.edu, the home of science and research news at the University of Arkansas.