Criminal offense

It might not be a shock to most of us that sporting events can spike the amount of violence in a college town. All we need to do is take a look at sports riots to see that the tribal spirit of sports leads to rather unsavory behavior. We have always supposed that the drunken brawling after the Hoosiers lost a football game came from the natural fighting quality in our Hoosier blood, roused by the excitement of our inexplicably bowl-bound team. Rarely, however, have we looked directly at the results of the home game on crime statistics to see whether our perceptions of the connection are true.\nLuckily, some nerds in Colorado did. Daniel I. Rees and Kevin T. Schnepel, authors of a University of Colorado-Denver paper titled “College Football Games and Crime,” said the amount of assault and vandalism rose on college home game days at 26 Division I-A universities. Using all sorts of confusing math we think they probably made up, Rees and Schnepel found notable increases in crime based on the presence of a game in a given city. Furthermore, those statistics increased significantly when the game was an upset win or loss. \nYou might think that higher-ranked teams with bigger football audiences suffer greater effects from home game crime, but the results in the Colorado study indicate that ranking doesn’t really affect the crime bump. That means even a home game of IU vs. Central Wyoming Community College that 12 people attend can cause the same problems as a titanic, over-hyped game like Ohio State vs. Michigan. \nSome might offer a solution that colleges should discourage drinking at football games or that criminal activity simply results from more alcohol consumption and nothing more. The authors, in fact, state that alcohol itself could well be the problem. We beg to differ. We know fully well the power that sport holds over us, and we intend to solve this problem head on: by winning. Plus, it’s not as if the alcohol isn’t flowing every weekend at IU. We hardly need an excuse like a football game to drive us to drink. They could close all the tailgating areas, stop beer sales within the stadium and ban all beer that comes in packs of 30, and we would still find a way to get hammered.\nWhat’s the solution? The team must simply play exactly to expectations. No upset wins or losses allowed. You see, the study suggests that upset wins lead to more damage than just a standard loss, which means it’s OK if we lose so long as we lose to a decent opponent. If Central Wyoming Community College beats us, we’re in for a long riot.\nWith football on hiatus, it bears wondering: What does this mean for basketball? Well, since we’re ranked higher than any other team on our future schedule, this means that we simply cannot lose a game until March. Of course, the tournament games move out of our fair city and we couldn’t care less whose city we demolish then.