You know that scene in Scream from 1996, where the blonde girl is home alone making popcorn? You know the one. The phone rings and she picks it up, and… you know the one. I don’t know if Wes Craven was the first to trademark the cliché, but since then, no one can deny the anxiety that comes from picking up a ringing phone during Halloween season.
Thanks to the famous movie franchise, once the end of September and the beginning of October come around, the ringing of a phone takes on an entirely different meaning… but maybe not for the reason you might think. For the months following the beginning of “spooky season,” the conversation following the dialing and ringing of a cell phone won’t involve the question of whether or not someone likes scary movies. Instead, the question that follows will be this:
“911, what is your emergency?”
While the easy response to this may call into question the uptick in general crime in October, often associated with Halloween, these specific police calls will be linked to a factor beyond anyone’s control: the beginning of the National Football League (NFL) season.
According to a 2011 study by David Card and Gordon B. Dahl, for the 17 weeks following the beginning of the NFL season, domestic violence rates, mostly directed at women, rose by 10% on football Sundays. The study used family violence data from over 750 city and county police agencies over a 12 year period, and concluded that “emotional cues based on the outcomes of professional football games exert a relatively strong effect on the occurrence of family violence.”
It’s important to note that no studies have been conducted in recent years linking watching football games to domestic violence. Nevertheless, according to the FBI’s 2026 Domestic Violence Special Report, rates jumped up by 27.5% following COVID-19 in 2020, and have remained consistent in recent years.
The concept of domestic violence being linked to sports is, sadly, not a new one. Every year, the story repeats itself, with more fans joining sports franchises and more women paying the price for it in the form of bruises, cuts, and sometimes even death.
While I would never advocate for the deconstruction of professional sports or go after them with a pitchfork, I do believe it’s important to gain knowledge, and, subsequently, awareness of the dangerous impacts that come with professional sports, both inside and outside of the field.
There are many things I could say about the violence that’s perpetuated not only by the nature of the sport of American football, but of the National Football League itself.
I could start with the violent nature of the game. A sport that involves large men smashing into each other at full speed and with full momentum, wearing pads and helmets that are supposed to protect them. They protect them so much that a recent study (2026) published in the BMJ Journal concluded that about 1 in 4 NFL players will develop CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), a degenerative brain disease caused by sustained, repeated impact to the head.
The revelations presented in the study only serve to highlight the reality most people already accept: football is a very violent, physical, and dangerous sport that has proven to have deadly consequences.
But why does it really matter? I mean, if these players know the risks and take the proper measures to protect themselves as much as they can, what’s the true harm of football?
I believe it’s most reflected in younger generations, specifically boys, and is manifested through desensitization and misplaced hero-worship, ultimately perpetuating the issue of violence that exists off the football field.
In 2018, a study on “Neurofunctional Differences in Response to Violence” compared NFL fans and non-fans’s neural responses to viewing “violent imagery.” In the end, the researchers found obvious differences in the neural activities between the two test groups. The study doesn’t conclude that NFL fans are more violent. What it did conclude is that football fans had less activation in the regions of the brain linked to empathy. People who strongly identify as football fans are often witnessing harsh collisions, strong tackles, and on-field fights, potentially causing a reduced emotional/neural response to violent material.
The conclusions of this study — while not concrete — support the idea that violent sports desensitize those who watch them to harsh material. This is mostly manifested in children and young adults, whose brains are more malleable and easier to mold.
While it’s bad enough that young kids are seeing violence on their screens three nights a week and possibly decreasing their ability to empathize because of it, the NFL also faces a whole ‘nother slew of issues completely off the field. Namely, allowing violent criminals to compete for their franchises.
While I could go into detail about the plethora of NFL players who have been arrested and convicted of violent crimes since the creation of the league in 1920, I think the most important thing to take into account is the true influence that these individuals have.
For all intents and purposes, nearly every man who steps onto a football field wearing a professional jersey is some kid’s hero. Like, literally his messiah. His, “I want to be just like him when I grow up.” His, “But dad, he’s doing it! So why can’t I?”
Since the first Olympics in ancient Greece, human beings have put an exorbitant amount of worship onto people with extreme physical prowess. Whether you’re fast, strong, or unbelievably agile, human beings decided it meant you were close to being a god. You should be worshiped for it; gifted with riches beyond imagination and idolized as if you’d decapitated a Hydra. In the big 2026, nearly 3,000 years later, nothing has really changed.
Athletes are paid more than doctors and teachers. Entire calendars revolve around catching a game, and cities literally become paralyzed to watch an act of physical dominance.
All of this is to say, the NFL players we watch every Sunday are some kids’ Heracles, and others’ Odysseus. To them, they’re close to gods. Their physical prowess means they can do no wrong.
This ideology is harmful, as it serves to further desensitize young people to the violence of the world of professional football. It puts physical ability over morality and pushes the idea that if you “perform,” what you do off the field doesn’t matter.
Adam Orla-Bukowski, a student at Johns Hopkins, put this ideology to the test in 2018, when he walked around his campus asking other college students their opinions on different athletes, all of which had committed violent crimes in the past. According to Orla-Bukowski, high-skilled athletes were only spoken about positively, often met with comments like “the best ever,” while lesser-skilled athletes were discussed in the context of whatever crime they had committed. “The correlation that I noticed is that the more famous or successful an athlete was or is, the less of a chance their history of violence was mentioned,” he stated.
This further reinforces the idea that violence committed by professional athletes is given “a pass” due to their physical ability. Results are put over morality once again, setting a precedent that professional athletes are above the law, and what they do outside of the field doesn’t matter as long as their production on the field remains strong.
The most recent example of this comes in the form of Deshaun Watson, who not only plays for the Cleveland Browns, but also stepped onto the field as their starting quarterback at the beginning of the season. Watson was accused of sexual misconduct in a professional setting by 27 women between 2020 and 2021, leading to a huge penalty of missing 11 games. A year later, he was back in uniform, running onto the field to the sound of harsh booing and strong insults from his own fans… until just this past week, when, thanks to him, the Browns achieved an upset win over the Pittsburgh Steelers. Suddenly, all the headlines had changed. Cleveland facing backlash over Watson Choice turned into Deshaun Watson goes from Cleveland villain to hero in Browns upset win, as home crowd turns jeers to cheers (a real Fox News article).
I believe this exact mentality serves to damage and influence the minds of young sports fans. The lessons they see reflected in the league’s tolerance of violence, the sports dangerous nature, and the justice system’s leniency towards athletes will only aid in completing the full circle that leads to a woman calling the police in the first week of the NFL season.
Of course this calls into question a dilemma as old as time: can and should you separate the artist from the art? In this case, I believe the answer should be no. Young people are seeing a man accused 27 times of sexual misconduct stand on a field and be praised for it in the forms of millions of dollars.
I don’t say these things to scare or dissuade you from watching an entertaining sport. For 17 weeks, the whole of the U.S. will gather together every Sunday, Monday, and Thursday night, and share a specific sense of community that only comes from sports. There’s its own beauty to it as well.
That being said, the statistics speak for themselves. The violent nature of football leads not only to physical danger, but to a possible indifference to violence on and off the field. It’s this indifference to immorality that will allow them to cheer on criminals and abusers so long as their numbers stay good. And it’s that same anger and lack of empathy that will contribute to the 10% increase in domestic violence cases in the 17 weeks following the beginning of the NFL season.
All I ask is that you take these things into account when watching this sport.
In October, some will celebrate wearing long pants. Others will anxiously await the day they can show off their new Halloween garb. Some will watch scary movies and others will watch football games. In the end, both will evoke reactions of fear.
They will be for entirely different reasons.