The purpose of the study titled Football was to test if West Coast (WC) professional football teams
had an advantage over East Coast (EC) teams in performance in games played
after 8pm due to circadian factors given the time zone. To do this they to data
spanning over 40 years that included over 100 teams and examining games played
in all days of the week including home and away games for a total of 106 games
and a control group of 293 daytime games. Using two data sets game times and
scores were verified and crossed referenced using multiple sources for confirmation
to see if the WC teams had beat the point spread or not. They figured this out
by using the formula:
Score of WC team – Score of EC team + Point
spread = x
If x was positive,
it meant that the WC team beat the point spread and if it was negative they did
not. The results concluded that there was a strong advantage for WC teams over
EC teams even accounting for the point spread. But the data also showed that
even though WC teams had an advantage over evening games the same was not said
for daytime games, for games played during the day the EC teams had the
advantage.
I found it interesting that they used data spanning over 40
years and ten referenced and crossed checked it all, it proved to be a very thorough
and well thought out study for the information that they had. With that being
said there was also a lot of things that they couldn’t test for and had to make
assumptions about which could have potentially skewed their data away from their
results.
I think this study applies to the general public in that no
matter if you are a collegiate athlete or just going to and from class and
studying for class or working a 9-5 or a day/night shift type job your body’s
sleep and our circadian physiology plays a bit part in how we perform on a day
to day basis.
I agree that it's quite impressive that the researchers collected data from 40 years' worth of football games. However, I also believe that this is one of the major drawbacks of the study. The researchers themselves mentioned that the game scores alone could not help them identify other factors that may have impacted player performance, such as drug/caffeine consumption, amount of sleep the night before the game, melatonin levels in the blood, etc. It would be interesting to see a similar study conducted with current games so that the researchers could collect more data from the players.
ReplyDeleteI also connected this research to academic performance! Surely if circadian rhythm plays such a large role for athletes then it might be just as important for students. Perhaps future studies will investigate when students are at peak performance during the day.