Sports injuries and game stakes: Concussions in the National Football League

Abstract

The National Football League's regular‐season games are not of equal importance: some games loom larger than others for determining a team's chance to qualify for the playoffs. We develop an incentive‐based measure of the impact of winning a game on a team's qualification probability to study the relationship between stakes and injuries. We find teams are 24 percentage points more likely to suffer concussions in games where a win secures one team a playoff berth. This is the first evidence to support the risk‐escalation hypothesis that injuries increase with a competition's stakes. We then discuss implications for sports injury prevention.