Regarding my earlier post, Kyle Jackson emailed me to ask about another intersection between my college sports loyalties and my research interests: "will the display have a negative effect on lynchings in the area?" See on this one of my papers on lynching here; several are another revision or two away from being circulated again. I have an idea for a paper on the rise of college football and the decline in violence in the South, but I'm skeptical about a relationship. There hasn't been a lynching in Tuscaloosa in many, many years, but I'll make the following predictions:

1. Alabama will see an explosion of babies born in early-to mid-September.

1a. It also occurs to me that, tragically, there will probably be an increase in the number of abortions in Alabama in the next couple of months.

I'm not sure how 1 and 1a would change if the University of Alabama hadn't canceled the first three days of classes in anticipation of the game. My guess is that since college students are probably more likely than others to engage in risky (i.e., unprotected) sex, both will be lower.

2. When the data are reported, they will show a rise in domestic violence in parts of Texas and a fall in domestic violence in parts of Alabama.

The more I think about it, the more I think that sports can be used as an identification strategy for topics related very broadly to reproduction, crime, teen pregnancy, sexual assault, and all sorts of other things. A recent paper by Card and Dahl argues that football upsets increase domestic violence. Collecting localized data on abortion, births, crime, etc. might be a little tricky, but with college football alone you have thousands of possible observations. For example, there changes in abortions, birth, and crime near schools that pulled off major upsets? Is the effect for football different from the effect for March Madness? How do effects change based on the size and type of the school? The mind boggles, but I think there are enough data here to give us clearer answers to important questions.