Coviello, Kassi

In 2012, the amount of reported concussions doubled in the past ten years to 3.8 million. Concussions and head-related injuries caused by contact sports can lead to long term traumatic brain injuries. With the increasing presence of these injuries, the National Football League and the National Hockey League have implemented extensive concussion protocols. This questions the underlying uncertainty of the future of contact sports. Our project addresses the question of hypothetically, if you had children, knowing what we know today about concussions/head related injuries, would you allow them to play contact sports. The decision to allow your child to play contact sports was motivated by the gender and age gap. The different levels of education had a statistically significant impact on the knowledge surrounding the current professional football and hockey concussion protocols.

Professional sports is a large industry that reaches
millions of Americans today. Those Americans are
called fans- the ones that support the teams, fill the
seats, and cheer them on from home. Occasionally
these professional sports teams decide to relocate
to another city, state, etc. Relocation has become
increasingly prevalent in the past few seasons. This
puts the dedicated fans in a difficult situation in
which they can remain loyal to the city or the specific
team itself. In order to analyze how someone would
react to their favorite professional sports team being
relocated, we developed a survey to addresses the
underlying question of would your favorite team
remain your favorite team even if they relocated.
Our results found that the decision to remain a fan or
switch to another team depends on gender and the
level of education.