American football is the most well-known and popular team sport in the United States of America. In Slovenia and the former Yugoslav region, there aren't many teams and players engaged in this sport. Therefore, the purpose of this master's thesis was to prepare the first research contribution on American football in the Slovenian language. With this aim, we examined the physical characteristics and motor efficiency of the most successful NFL players and determined their correlation with playing performance. We included 200 participants in the study who participated in the NFL selection from 2015 to 2018. For each NFL selection, we selected 50 participants based on playing performance criteria, who were the most successful in performing the NFL test battery. We obtained data on physical characteristics, performance, and playing performance in April 2023 from the Pro Football Reference website. Physical characteristics were defined by two variables representing height and weight. Motor efficiency was defined by six variables representing tests from the NFL test battery for measuring motor abilities. Playing performance was defined by thirteen variables for eight playing positions. Statistical analysis of the data was conducted using IBM SPSS 25 (SPSS Inc., Armonk, NY, USA). Descriptive variables were presented with frequencies, while numerical variables were presented with means and standard deviations. The correlation between variables defining physical characteristics and motor efficiency with playing performance was examined using Spearman's correlation coefficients. Their correlation was interpreted according to Leskošek (2017). Statistically significant differences in physical characteristics, motor efficiency, and performance among participants for eight playing positions were tested using a one-sample t-test. The results were evaluated as statistically significant at a 5% risk level. Statistical analysis of variables revealed some interesting statistically significant correlations between physical characteristics and motor efficiency with playing performance of NFL American football players, which will undoubtedly be of interest to both narrower and wider professional audiences.
|