With NCAA college football bowl season winding down, many sports experts and announcers have been busy lately making their predictions for who would win and who would lose. A recent study by the National Bureau for Economic Research suggests, however, that even when teams win, players can still lose.

It’s no surprise that if you’re up celebrating a win that you might skip your 8AM general psychology course. But the study actually demonstrated that when college football teams win, the players for that team generally begin to earn lower grades. And it doesn’t stop there. The authors actually studied the grade point averages for all male students at the University of Oregon through the fall semesters of 1999 through 2007. Their findings showed that a 25 percent increase in the football team’s winning percentage translated to male students earning grades that were comparable to students whose SAT scores were 27 points lower.

The researchers used follow-up questions to verify that, in fact, male students do tend to party and drink more, as well as study less, when their school football team is on a winning streak. They are also quick to point out that the difference may even be greater than that reported, since grades at the University of Oregon are adjusted to fit the bell curve. This means that if all students are scoring lower on a test, the lower grades will not appear to be as low as they would normally be without the curve.

So, at a time when college football has again captured the national spotlight, perhaps the attention should be turned to how football programs affect student performance and what can be done to address these concerns. When an extracurricular activity affects not only those participating, but the entire student body, it is no doubt worthy of a degree of extra scrutiny.