You cannot be afraid to fail.

I have an 8-year-old son. There's no way I'd let him play Taka football.

I had never been in an environment that was so emotionally charged.

The fight started and I hit her as hard as I could.

I would say that sports was my way of becoming American.

I want to leave this sport being known as a bad mother f***er.

I would say most things that we think are true do turn out to be true, not always for the reasons we think.

Toby Mosquitz is an economist who teaches at the Yale School of Management.

That's right. Yes, so you have won a really prestigious academic award.

It's one of the top finance scholars in the world. Why do you mess around with sports?

It's called tenure. They can't fire me.

No, it's one of the things I tell my students all the time is don't go into this business unless you really love what you research.

Sports has always intrigued me and to be a little bit more serious, a lot of what I study is behavioral economics

and how people make decisions when faced with a lot of uncertainty. Sports is just a really rich field to look at those kinds of things.

This is a true fact. It's why you see a lot of economists messing around in sports.

It's why you see a lot of sports themed academic journals and conferences.

Sports may not be nearly as important as education or health care or politics, but when you do research in those areas,

it can be really hard to establish cause and effect.

There are so many inputs of so many different types and such hard to measure outputs.

Furthermore, the incentives in education and health care and politics are often opaque or worse twisted.

In sports, the incentives are usually transparent, the results are clean, and if you like data as economists do,

well sports provides boatloads of data. Most of which happens to be neatly categorized and extend back for decades.

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