Touchdown! Goal! Or whatever it is you shout when the play goes your way. Isn’t it a great feeling when your team is winning? But it sincerely sucks when you’re on the losing side. What’s this got to do with driving you want to know? Stick around and learn.

The University of Leicester (in the United Kingdom) recently released the result of a study that it conducted about the affect of sports on a driver’s ability to concentrate. They estimate that nearly 2 million drivers got into an accident or just missed getting into one while they were listening to a ball game on the radio. Now, if those figures are based on U.K. drivers who primarily have only a single sport (soccer, which they confusingly call football) to cheer about, imagine how high the statistics might be in the United States. We don’t root for just a single team. No, we’ve got favorites in every sport. And we’re fanatic about them.

Certainly, if we had our druthers we’d rather be home in front of the TV watching the game (really, we’d kill — figuratively — to have front-row seats at the stadium, so who are we kidding). But, sometimes, it’s inevitable that you’ll have to use your imagination and listen to the game on the radio. If you’re the driver, that means that what has really got your attention is not the road ahead, but the relief pitcher who’s coming in at the bottom of the ninth or the fumble that put the football in the hands of the opponent (enemy) or the alley-oop pass.

The problem is that you’re doing the same thing in your car that you do in front of the television: Screaming and cheering and clapping and getting much too involved for your own good, or the good of others near you. The study showed that a fanatic will behave erratically, especially during high pressure situations in the game; they’ll speed up, swerve into other lanes and generally drive aggressively.

Take a pass on driving and listening to a game at the same time. Do one or the other, or pass the keys onto someone who couldn’t care less who wins or loses. That’s a win-win situation.