The associate professor’s work on off-duty deviance was recently cited in an article on predicting arrest rates of NFL draft picks.
The article, “Using data to predict arrest rates of NFL draft picks,” discusses if there is a way to judge football players who have encountered off-the-field trouble or otherwise shown a concerning character trait. With the upcoming NFL draft, the author, Kevin Seifert, asks if it is possible for a data set to serve as a predictive tool for football players’ behavior.
Seifert cites research from the academic paper, “Off-Duty Deviance: Organizational Policies and Evidence for Two Prevention Strategies,” which appeared in the April 2016 issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology. Lyons and the paper’s co-authors Brian J. Hoffman, University of Georgia, William H. Bommer, California State University-Fresno, Colby L. Kennedy, University of Georgia, and Andrea L. Hetrick, University of Georgia, explored the relevance of employee off-duty deviance (ODD) to modern organizations and the potential approaches to reduce the incidence of ODD.
In reference to the academic paper, Seifert writes, “There were two NFL draft-related results. First, that between 2001 and 2012, players with publicly-documented pre-draft arrests were nearly twice as likely to be arrested after reaching the NFL than those who had not been arrested. The second, which is perhaps less obvious and more valuable, was that there was a small but clear correlation between arrests and Wonderlic tests scores. Players who scored below the mean in the researchers’ sample were also about twice as likely to be arrested in the NFL as those who scored above it.”
The full article can be viewed here.