NFL Quarterback Research Articles

NFL Quarterback Development—The Role of Competing Quarterbacks, Rookie Playing Time, and Team Quality

Using data from 1994 to 2017, we consider characteristics that affect quarterback (QB) development in the National Football League. Our analysis leads to three key findings. Firstly, we show that a young QB’s career is worsened when he plays alongside a Pro Bowl QB. Secondly, we find that QB’s career outcomes are better when they are drafted by a bad team. Finally, we investigate the role of rookie playing time and find evidence that playing as a rookie reduces career outcomes. In all three cases, the effects are largest in the latter portion of a QB’s career.

“Putting His Off-Field Issues Aside…”: Exploring Online Sport Fan Community Response to Allegations Against Deshaun Watson

In March 2022, a Texas grand jury chose not to indict NFL quarterback Deshaun Watson with sexual misconduct, facilitating his trade from the Houston Texans to the Cleveland Browns. This study used publicly accessible Reddit posts ( n = 273) to explore sport fan conversations about Watson from the day a grand jury announced it would not indict him to the day the Cleveland Browns issued an official statement about the trade. I analyzed post text, top-level comments, and replies to the top-level comment on each post using reflexive thematic analysis. Results suggest that while most conversations about Watson avoided discussion of sexual violence, fans also supported or resisted rape culture. Few fans shared an intention to no longer support a team that traded for Watson, highlighting the cognitive dissonance fans may face when navigating opinions about sexual violence and the importance of fandom to their identity. The presence of conversations supporting rape culture and limited space for civil discussions of athlete-perpetrated violence may impact some fans’ attitudes toward sexual violence while making online fan communities an unsafe space for others. These findings have implications for understanding sport fan cultures vis-à-vis sexual violence and situational prevention targeting sport fans.

Start-up raises funds for cell-based meat

The start-up Prolific Machines has raised $42 million to develop a cell-based meat manufacturing platform that it describes as an assembly line for biology. The company hopes to bring down the cost of cell-based meat by avoiding recombinant growth factor proteins, an expensive ingredient. Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the series A financing round, which included basketball stars, an NFL quarterback, and a celebrity chef. Prolific Machines is building a 2,300 m 2 headquarters in California.

Violating the Racial Contract: Black Professional Athletes and the Case of Michael Vick

This essay examines the way in which race has functioned in the career of former NFL quarterback Michael Vick, by looking primarily at the way in which Vick’s image and career have been created, maintained, and ultimately renegotiated in relation to Charles Mills’ concept of the racial contract. Relying on the theoretical framework provided by Mills, as well as academic and popular press coverage of Vick’s career, the analysis begins by outlining the theoretical framework of the racial contract, then moves to an examination of Vick’s early life and career, the basic facts surrounding the dogfighting scandal an his subsequent suspension and imprisonment, and, ultimately, his return to the NFL. This will be followed by a discussion of the exact nature of Vick’s transgressions in regards to the contract; namely, that his crimes called attention to and ultimately made visible the parallel between the violence inherent in the “sport” of dog-fighting and the dehumanizing violence enacted upon African American men in professional football. The essay concludes with a look at how dominant society relies on the racial narratives circulated around black professional athletes like Michael Vick, as well as suggestions for revising the terms of the racial contract.

Effects of Age and Travel on National Football League Quarterback Performance: A Correlational Study

Background: Long-distance travel is common for professional athletes; thus, the impact of jet-lag on athletic performance is a relevant topic. Additionally, older individuals take longer to recover from exercise and post-travel fatigue; therefore, it is likely that age and travel affect performance. Objective: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of age and travel on NFL quarterback performance. Method: A correlational research design is used to examine the effects of age and travel on NFL quarterback performance. Data were collected from pro-football-reference.com. Quarterback ratings from the 2018 NFL season are analyzed with age, distance traveled, season week, and weeks since the team’s bye week. The interaction of age and distance is also included to examine the impact of the age-distance relationship on performance. Regression analysis is used to predict quarterback ratings. Results: Season week (p = 0.04), weeks since a bye week (p = 0.041), and distance traveled (p = 0.031) have negative effects on quarterback ratings. The age-performance relationship in NFL quarterbacks is non-linear (p = 0.018), with quarterback performance decreasing during an athlete’s 20s and then increasing during an athlete’s 30s. Additionally, ratings of younger quarterbacks decrease with farther distances traveled, while the ratings of older quarterbacks increase with farther distances traveled (p = 0.072). Conclusions: Differences in performance by age with travel may be the result of different severities of jet-lag symptoms experienced by younger and older quarterbacks, as well differences in strategies for managing post-travel fatigue by athletes of different ages.

NFL total quarter back rating (QBR) is not decreased following sport related concussion injury

Our hypothesis was that NFL quarterbacks, due to the high-risk nature of the position and social and financial pressures to return to play following SRC, return to play prematurely and, thus, their on-field performance suffers due to the nature of their injury. This study was a case–control study of a retrospective cohort of all NFL quarterbacks who were placed on the injury report for a concussion from 2006 to 2019. The data were compiled using publicly available information extracted from NFL transactions. Reportable injuries were based on the criteria that the injury necessitated a team physician referral or emergent care and resulted in scheduled team practice time being missed. Athletes injured in the pre-season or athletes who were injured and did not return to play during the regular were excluded from the study. There were 4 quarterbacks included in the study who suffered repeated concussions during separate seasons; repeated concussion in the same player was treated as two different data points. No quarterback included suffered multiple concussions within the same season. All active NFL quarterbacks injured during a regular season game were eligible for inclusion as age-matched controls. Quarterbacks included in the concussion injury cohort were excluded from the control group. The MEDCALC case–control matching procedure was used to randomly match cases and controls with a 1:1 allocation ratio, respectively, based on age (matching). There was no significant difference in age at injury, years in the NFL when injured, and weeks missed due to injury between the concussion and control groups. There was no statistically significant difference between average season QBR and weekly QBR for the first 6 weeks following return to play after an injury when comparing the concussion to control group. QBR in NFL quarterbacks’ did not decrease in the weeks returning from concussion when compared with age-matched control group. This finding was contrary to our hypothesis and suggests that a quarterback’s functional skill is not significantly affected by an SRC incident by the time he returns to play. Level III prognostic study, case–control study.

(No) Flag on the Play: Framing Cam Newton’s Penalty Concerns as an Issue of Size, Sportsmanship, and Fairness

During a Week 8 post-game press conference in the 2016 season, NFL quarterback Cam Newton explicitly criticized the officiating crew of the game for not calling penalties on late hits that he felt put his safety at risk. This study analyzes the media responses that followed, identifying the evaluations made of Newton’s claim and the arguments media personalities presented in justifying those evaluations. We found the majority of statements provided support, both for Newton’s claims and his right to speak out. However, in both statements of support and dismissal, references to size dominated the discourse, reducing Newton to his physical abilities and perpetuating the brain versus brawn dichotomy, which is applied along racial lines to athletes. We argue reliance on this stereotype allows race to be an implicit factor in assessing athletes but never an explicit topic of discussion. At issue is not only that differences exist in how reporters talk about Black and White athletes, but also that these differences have evolved from racial biases obscured through the use of the stereotype, which we argue functions as a value hierarchy. Further, we argue that the continued use of such stereotypes can have significant impacts on player safety and agency.

Public Online Interest in Injuries Sustained by National Football League Quarterbacks

PurposeTo use Google search data to determine the public’s interest in learning about athletic injuries sustained by NFL quarterbacks and to investigate how long this interest persists after the injuries.MethodsWe identified starting NFL quarterbacks during the 2019–2020 season online and used the official NFL injury report to determine whether an injury had occurred to a quarterback. We used the Google Trends tool to analyze search trends around a quarterback’s injuries from July 22, 2019, to October 22, 2019. Google trends data was extracted as relative search volume over time. We then compared the results to the expected search forecast derived from an autoregressive integrated moving algorithm (ARIMA) model.ResultsAll 6 injured quarterbacks were associated with increases (64% to 100%) in relative search volumes for terms related to their injury. Furthermore, the data showed a consistent increase in search engine activity around the injuries associated with NFL quarterbacks in the first 3 days, marking a particularly influential time frame for public engagement.ConclusionOur data show an increase in Google traffic surrounding the injuries of prominent NFL quarterbacks within the first 3 days following their injuries.Clinical RelevanceSocial media can provide a platform for patient education through increasing patient awareness and knowledge regarding athletic injuries.

Once More, With Feeling: Sport, National Anthems, and the Collective Power of Affect

In this paper I apply insights from Sport Studies, Indigenous Studies, Music Studies, and Feminist Cultural Studies to illuminate and theorize the cultural, material, and political affective salience of national anthems staged prior to sporting events. To do so I analyze two different cases: The Aboriginal musical trio Asani’s 2014 multi-lingual performance of “O Canada” prior to an Oilers hockey game which closed Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) events in Edmonton, Alberta; and the projection of hatred onto former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest of racism during the playing of the U.S. national anthem in 2016. Analysis suggests that these emotive, often visceral musical performances and responses are not contained within individual subjects but instead reflect contextually specific repetitive (dis)articulations across time, space, and a variety of bodies. Placed within broader colonial contexts, Asani’s version of the Canadian anthem is exemplary of the embodied sensory, but politically limited settler-oriented communitas of Canadian TRC inclusionary music as previously explicated by Robinson. Kaepernick’s anti-racist kneeling activism provides an additional case to theorize the relationship of national anthems in regards to movements for and against an imagined white nation as well as State-sanctioned colonization and hatreds.

Weaponized Patriotism and Racial Subtext in Kaepernick’s Aftermath: The Anti-politics of American Sports Fandom

The history of sports culture and fandom has long been as reactionary as it has been hospitable to progressive politics. As the most conspicuous recent example, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s U.S. anthem protest generated intense controversy with many critics claiming that sports and politics should, generally, not mix—a condemnation that ignores that context’s already pervasive militaristic nationalism. This article offers the first nationally representative examination of fans’ antipathy toward sports’ politicization through a critical textual analysis and inductive classification of their responses to the issue. Ostensibly “aracial” rebukes to that activism could nonetheless be characterized in lineage with historically stereotypical representations of and affronts to black athletes: as threatening to society, not intellectually equipped to engage, and illegitimate as leaders.

Oh, Say, Can You Kneel: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of Colin Kaepernick’s Racial Protest

In 2016, Colin Kaepernick, a Black NFL quarterback, began sitting and kneeling during the Star-Spangled Banner to protest oppression against people of color in the United States. Instead of beginning a discussion on race, however, Kaepernick’s resistance sparked criticisms that he was unpatriotic. Using aversive racism, symbolic/modern racism, and colorblind racism as a theoretical framework, this critical discourse analysis of ten American newspapers found that patriotic ideals—the American flag, military, and National Anthem, in particular—were used as a way to avoid completely discussions on racism.

“Just Do It? An Examination of Race on Attitudes Associated with Nike’s Advertisement Featuring Colin Kaepernick”

ABSTRACT The relationship between race and just about any social issue has been and continues to be controversial. Within the context of literature on public opinion regarding sports and social movements, this study considers the intersections between race, business, and athlete activism by examining attitudes related to Nike’s controversial advertisement campaign with former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Results obtained from a sample of young adults reveals a deep racial divide between black and non-black respondents. At almost a ratio of 2:1, blacks were more likely to agree with Nike’s decision to use the former player in their advertisement, that Nike should address social issues in their ads, and that Nike should contribute to his charity. These race differences remain in models that control for a variety of other correlates, including political orientation, income, discrimination, player protests, and whether they watch the NFL.

The Spiral of Stereotyping: Social Identity Theory and NFL Quarterbacks

ABSTRACTThis experiment tested stereotypes and message credibility associated with Black and White quarterbacks. Participants were asked to rate quarterbacks based on stereotypes identified in previous literature and then were asked to rate the credibility of stereotype-consistent or inconsistent messages. The study found that participants stereotyped both races, but Black participants actually stereotyped more strongly. Only messages concerning stereotype-consistent descriptors of White quarterbacks were rated as more credible. These results are interpreted based on social identity theory.

Race and the Deep Ball: Applying Stereotypes to NFL Quarterbacks

This study experimentally tested whether White participants (N = 274) applied stereotypes to Black and White professional quarterbacks. Using common stereotypical descriptors established in prior research, this between-subjects experiment found that while the participants did not stereotype White quarterbacks, they did apply the stereotypes of “physically strong” and “naturally gifted” to Black quarterbacks, thus othering, or using race to establish an out group. These results are interpreted through the framework of social-identity theory.

Celebrating Critical Geographies of Latin America: Inspired by an NFL Quarterback

Celebrating Critical Geographies of Latin America: Inspired by an NFL Quarterback Sharlene Mollett Normally, I have no idea when the NFL football season begins. It seems to simply appear as summer turns to autumn. In 2016, however, the start of the NFL season could not go unnoticed, nor could San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick. For those who managed to miss this story, Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem during a pre-game moment of military appreciation made international headlines. At the time, his one-man protest was as an act of civil disobedience in the face of a long and recent history of police brutality and racial oppression in the United States.1 As Kaepernick insisted, “I’m not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color…there are bodies in the street and people [police officers] getting paid leave and getting away with murder” (NFL.com 2016). Kaepernick’s protest reveals someone who recognizes that racism (and injustices more generally) will not simply disappear by looking away. It is in this vein that I welcome the invitation to reflect on what a critical turn, a move towards more “critical and progressive scholarship,” might look like in the Journal of Latin American Geography (JLAG) (Gaffney et al. 2016: 1). Of course, this is not the first time in recent memory that critical geographers working in the region have sought to reflect on what it means to be “critical.” These efforts have popped up as both special issues and conference presentations since at least 2005 (Sundberg 2005; Kingsbury and Sletto 2005). Also we must acknowledge that there exists a robust mini-subfield of critical Latin Americanists who have made important contributions on various topics including migration and inequality, gentrification, race and urban space, women’s environmental knowledges, indigenous mapping, the politics of biodiversity conservation, extraction, land titling, labour injustice and femicide to name a few (Wainwright 2008; Swanson 2010; Werner 2011; Finn 2012; Mollett 2013; Ojeda 2013; Wright 2014; Hanson 2015; Bastia 2015; Bryan 2015). What is different now, however, is that the new editorial team is calling upon scholars, much like those cited above, to populate the journal with scholarship that offers “a conceptually pluralistic and geographically extensive understanding of Latin America” and research that “explicitly challenges the injustices of this notoriously unequal [End Page 165] region and explores avenues for change” (Gaffney et al. 2016: 1). Such a cogent call deserves celebration, particularly because much of the inequality that occurs in Latin America operates globally as well. Indeed, racial and gender violence is planetary: racial profiling and police brutality, the recent Brexit decision in the UK, the Trump Presidency in the US, the detention of child migrants and refugee claimants, human trafficking; a post-apartheid era that has only galvanizes racial hierarchies in South Africa; impunity for gang rapes in both conflict zones and so-called democratic states; honor killings, disproportionate rates of poverty among indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, the list goes on. Notwithstanding important forms of resistance, the continuity of racial and gender inequalities is so rampant that one wonders if most people unaffected by such events actually move through the world asleep. Kaepernick certainly does not, and nor should we. If we want our work to be meaningful beyond academia, then commitment to more progressive and critical geographic knowledge production is urgent. In this commentary, I reflect on JLAG’s invitation for critical scholarship on Latin America. In doing so, I suggest that this turn should prioritize and counter what has been undertheorized and ignored to date, namely, racial and gendered power. In an admittedly unscientific and superficial peruse of JLAG titles, abstracts, and keywords since 2010, I could not ignore the paucity of research attending to racial power and racialized processes, patriarchy, Afro-descendant peoples, and gendered-based violence. While there is slightly more interest in indigenous peoples, particularly their landscapes, livelihoods, and mapping them both, very few articles engage in racial formations of plantation agriculture or settler appropriation, and there is almost no trace of critical feminist and postcolonial theorizing. While the current (all white male) editorial...

"Team chemistry" through chemistry lenses: interdisciplinary science or a metaphorical conundrum?

A Google search on “team chemistry” returns over 443,000 entries (October 2014) usually denoting some sort of team process, such as cohesion, shared mental models, and collective efficacy. Practitioners (e.g., athletic coaches and business managers) often emphasize the importance of team chemistry for optimal performance. For instance, former NFL quarterback and current business executive Roger Staubach noted that “In any team sport, the best teams have consistency and chemistry.” Researchers in performance psychology also allude to the notion of “team chemistry” when discussing exceptional teams (Levine, 1994; Gershgoren et al., 2013).

A Hero or Sissy? Exploring Media Framing of NFL Quarterbacks Injury Decisions

There has been growing attention on health and safety issues in sport, most notably football. Consequently, it is important that communication scholars attend to this topic. This research explored print media framing in response to two injury situations involving National Football League quarterbacks—Jay Cutler and Robert Griffin III. An analysis of 177 newspaper articles revealed 11 frames that were used to discuss these injuries. The most prominent frame for Cutler was support while shifting the blame was most prominent for Griffin. The results suggest that sports journalists framing of injuries could potentially be a catalyst to shift football cultural norms towards valuing players who put their health first. The results also reveal that organizations may shoulder most of the blame for players’ injuries, which suggests a short-term setback may be more beneficial in the long-term interest of the organization.

Kappa Opioid Receptor‐Based Treatments for Pain (LB88)

Dangerous painkillers may cause serious problems for those who fall into drugs’ addictive trap, such as former NFL quarterback Brett Favre. The addictiveness of painkillers such as OxyContin and Vicodin is largely attributed to the response they trigger in proteins such as mu opioid receptors (MOPs). This receptor activates cellular signaling pathways responsible for dulling pain; however, the protein also has the ability to stimulate cellular signaling pathways that makes MOP‐based painkillers rewarding. An alternate target that alleviates pain but does not produce reward is the kappa opioid receptor (KOP). Unfortunately, many KOP agonists also activate signaling pathways that produce hallucinogenic effects. To investigate the changes that occur when KOP binds to different ligands, the Divine Savior Holy Angels SMART (Students Modeling A Research Topic) Team has used 3D printing technology to model the active site of the KOP with salvinorin A, to see how the induced fit changes the signal transduction pathways in a neuron. Manipulating receptor proteins like the KOP to inhibit pain pathways without the addictive effect of MOP‐targeting painkillers would be a breakthrough in chronic pain management. Computer‐aided drug design helps streamline the development of KOP ligands that activate this receptor in ways that result in less hallucinogenic effects.Grant Funding Source: Supported by a grant from NIH‐CTSA.

The Dangerous Individual('s) Dog: Race, Criminality and the ‘Pit Bull’

Though it is generally acknowledged that there is a relationship between racist discourse and the figure of the non-human animal, this relationship is almost always assumed to be analogical: oppressed groups are compared with or treated as non-human animals. But the recent dogfighting case against NFL Quarterback Michael Vick and the attendant suspicion of ‘pit bulls’ suggests that racism today has a more complex relationship with (certain types of) animals than the analogy would capture. An analysis of this discourse both calls for and revises Foucault's notion of ‘the dangerous individual’ as an explanatory concept for contemporary racism. The concomitant revulsion toward both dogfighting and ‘pit bulls’ suggests an expression of fear of a perceived threat to normative whiteness, insofar as these ‘dangerous’ dogs are figured as carriers of the contagion of racial abnormality.

Four Jewish Novelists Facing Aging Differently

Four Jewish Novelists Facing Aging Differently Sanford Pinsker (bio) The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. —Oscar Wilde Older Jewish characters have been a fixture in Jewish novels for some time, usually as objects to be satirized and roundly dismissed. As they sway over thick volumes of the Talmud or concoct fanciful curses against the Evil Spirits, Yiddish grandfathers and grandmothers are meant to represent the Old World and thus everything that a younger, more assimilating generation is eager to forget. Small wonder, then, that the elderly are nearly always Orthodox—and their offspring are decidedly not. On rare occasions—one thinks of Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family series—sentimentality easily trumps dramatic tension, and the result is more akin to ethnic celebration than it is to serious literature. What happens to Jewish novelists is what happens to us all: they get older. And as I thought about this fairly unremarkable truth, the names of four Jewish novelists—each one complicated in his or her own way—kept popping up in my consciousness. They are the British novelist Howard Jacobson at seventy-one, and the Americans Philip Roth at eighty, Cynthia Ozick at eighty-five, and Herman Wouk (rhymes with smoke) at a remarkable ninety-seven. Their personal adjustments to time's winged chariot tell us nearly as much about aging as do wrinkles and graying hair. I was surely not the only person who was surprised and more than a little saddened to learn that Philip Roth would no longer be reading, much less writing fiction. He leaked this startling news to a French magazine (Les InRocks) in October 2012, and followed this up with a long interview with Charles McGrath of the New York Times a month later. Roth insists that there will be no more interviews, and that his decision is final: his fictional revels are now officially ended. [End Page 393] Las Vegas bookies do not much care about Roth, which is to say that they have not calculated the odds of his coming out of retirement as they once did for such crooners as Frank Sinatra or such nfl quarterbacks as Brett Favre. Roth is simply not on their radar. By contrast lifelong Roth readers scratch their collective heads and hope, despite the evidence from Roth's mouth, that he will write yet again. I don't plan to back up my hopes for an out-of-retirement Mr. Roth, but I would lay down serious money that he will help Blake Bailey, his authorized biographer. Therein lies no end of arguments and, count on it, disaster. I say this because Roth will probably quarrel with every page, every paragraph, indeed every sentence that Bailey writes. James Atlas, the author of the magisterial Bellow: A Biography (2002), made it clear that it was hard to keep Saul Bellow out of his hair and away from his writing desk. No doubt Bellow's generous offers to spend time with Atlas were flattering, but Atlas understood that they came with a quid pro quo—namely that Bellow expected to be treated with kid gloves. Bailey, I fear, will have it worse. As I imagine it, Roth gives him box after valuable box of letters, manuscripts, and notes, all with the expectation that he will be pleased, if not downright flattered, by the use Bailey makes of his biographical contributions. What I've just described is more akin to hagiography than to anything that might give rough justice to Roth's complicated life. I may not be an insider like Bailey, but I have been following Roth's long trail of tears since I was a freshman in college. Among all the important things that Goodbye, Columbus (1959) taught me about fiction, the most important lesson might have been that stories happen at the end of your nose. There is no need, as I imagined in my pre-Roth days, for authors to go on safaris with Ernest Hemingway or raise pints with James Joyce in dear dirty Dublin to be a real writer. John Updike taught me a similar lesson about growing up in small...