How the NFL responds to accusations of violence against women has been discussed anecdotally for years, usually focusing on the short-term punishment individual athletes did or did not receive from their teams or the league. But a recent study examined this issue more comprehensively, asking: Do arrests for accusations of violence against women hurt NFL players’ careers?
The answer, according to the peer-reviewed study published in May in the academic journal Violence Against Women, is: not really.
Such arrests have "negligible” consequences for players as a group, the study found, based on a statistical analysis of career outcomes. While the effect of arrests grew increasingly negative over the course of the 19-year period analyzed, that effect disappeared with even average or slightly below-average on-field performance levels.