Dominik Bodzianowski
Pronouns: He/Him
Research Mentor(s): Katherine Babiak
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Sport Management / Kinesiology
Program:
Authors:
Session: Session 3: 11:00 am – 11: 50 am
Poster: 64
Abstract
The National Football League is watched by tens of millions of people every year, and is one of the largest sporting organizations in the world. This study looks into what might prompt the NFL into changing its rules. First, we obtained copies of every NFL rulebook from 2000 to 2023. We converted them into text files and demarcated the beginning of each rule, section, and article. We then turned the text of each rule, section, and article into a vector and compared how much each rule vector changed year to year. We then counted the number of changes per rule per year and then compared that to a set of independent variables, such as league revenues, margin of victory, average score, player injuries, or penalties. We found that there were significant correlations between our independent variables and the amount of rule changes per year. The National Football League can use the research we did to fine tune their rule changes in order to get the effects on gameplay which they want. We can also predict the effects that rule changes will have on gameplay or variables such as revenues or margin of victory.
