Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Reuters
The last play of Tom Brady’s career was a bad one. For a guy who had become the GOAT by being obnoxiously perfect, a throw that was inches out of the reach of Tampa Bay wide receiver Julio Jones was an ignoble way to go out. Perhaps the years had finally caught up to Brady or he had already mentally checked out of an NFL season he reportedly gave up his marriage to play in. But a team of academics from two Louisiana universities recently published a paper that points to another culprit: air pollution.
There’s already a substantial body of evidence pointing to air quality affecting performance in solo athletes—one recent study found that even small amounts of air pollution equate to slower times for college track athletes. Researchers have also looked at soccer players, finding that when players are exposed to worse air, they make fewer passes and not only run less, but play with less intensity. But the new peer-reviewed study was the first attempt by scientists to see how air pollution affects pros in big North American sports—baseball and football.
And what the researchers found was consistent with those previous studies: teams and players based in cities with worse air quality made more errors, threw more interceptions and made other costly mistakes, and just generally performed at a lower level.