By Amy Weaver, Auburn University
News of traumatic brain injuries and suicides among professional and college football players has made many question the violent nature of the game. Rule changes, such as the NCAA’s targeting rule, have been imposed to promote player safety, and yet concussions continue to occur.
Using Auburn University’s functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI machine to study the brain functions of college football fans and non-football fans when they were exposed to violent imagery, a team of researchers suspect additional regulations that improve player safety and make the game less violent could affect fandom.
Auburn Associate Professor David Martin in the Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Hospitality Management posed it as such: “If we have fans who are attracted to the violence aspect of the sport and we start to sanitize it to make it safer for the players, at what point do we start to lose fans?”
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