Updated on: 11/22/2019
It’s no secret that football fans love to have a few drinks. But when those same fans get behind the wheel, what kind of damage are they doing?
At Davis Law Group we represent victims of drunk driving accidents. We try to encourage responsible behavior and prevent drunk driving tragedies. Despite the efforts of educators, law enforcement, and countless non-profits, the problem of drunk driving persists, and some colleges are especially prone its devastating consequences.
To illustrate this issue, we focused on the teams in the Sporting News’ preseason Top 25 poll, a collection of schools scattered across the country. We then compared each team’s drunk driving fatality rate in its geographic footprint.
The study has been featured on 247Sports, Penn Live, UGAWire, and Nola.com.
The University of South Carolina, located in Columbia, SC, had the highest rate in our study. Each year, there are an average of 7.45 fatalities as a result of alcohol-impaired driving per 100,000 people in the Gamecocks’ region. Drivers heading to Williams-Brice Stadium this season...watch out.
Michigan came last — but that’s a good thing. In Washtenaw County and the surrounding area, there are just 0.73 drunk driving deaths per 100,000 people.
Teams located near or in big cities — Michigan (25), Washington (22), USC (21) and Stanford (20) — all ranked low on our list, while teams south of the Mason Dixon line generally had a higher rate of fatal car crashes.
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Methodology
- We began by using National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics, taking county-level crash data for all alcohol-involved crashes (ie. drunk driving crashes) over five years, from 2013 to 2017.
- We then narrowed the list to counties that are home or border a Sporting News preseason Top 25 college football team.
- We calculated the average number of drunk driving fatalities per year, per county over the five year span. To determine the number of drunk driving fatalities per year, per 100,000 people we used the following formula: Average annual drunk driving fatalities ÷ (total population ÷ 100,000) = Drunk driving fatalities per 100,000 people.
