"If you took a gang of rugby players who'd been doing lots of physical training, who'd won a game and were hyped up and their levels of testosterone were very high and you put them in a church maybe nothing would happen. If you put them in a strip club you may get lots of different effects," he said.
Throw in a dose of modern celebrity culture and a female audience and trouble is even more likely to build up.
Nick Neave, an evolutionary psychologist from Northumbria University, agrees.
"You've got these young men in the prime of their athletic life. Women want them because they're famous, they're healthy, attractive and, yes, they're in a social situation that rewards them for being high in testosterone and they're going to take opportunities," Neave reports.
"You can't blame them really: they're only doing what nature has primed them to do." source
Well-Being Australia chairman Mark Tronson, a Baptist minister who has ministered to elite athletes for 27 years, including involvement with Cricket and the Olympics, noticed that Andrew Stevenson has inadvertently recognised one solution to engaging in socially unacceptable behaviour.
His words, "if you put them in church maybe nothing would happen" struck a chord with M V Tronson, as a variation of this is what precisely does happen in a large number of sporting situations.
"Many teams get together in a huddle immediately or shortly after a game and say a prayer together thanking the Lord, whether they have won or lost," Mark Tronson said.
He knows from experience that many professional sports teams in the US engage in this practice, as well as several Australian teams, and he recalls that the 1995 South African Rugby World Cup team engaged in prayer after they won the final. He has also observed many Olympic track and field athletes are regulars at giving thanks to the Lord.
This very act serves several purposes.
First, the notion they come before the Lord, immediately brings a realignment to reality, that although they have played a great game, there is a much bigger world to which they belong.
Second, this 'team prayer' brings a sense of mutual responsibility of team members for each other, this a reminder they are a unit, and to look out for each other.
Third, as Andrew Stevenson has pointed out, it redirects the energies running through their veins, it is a physical thing.
"Whether anyone realises the psychology of this kind of prayer in lessening the dangers is another question entirely, but in my experience over many decades, there really is something in it," M V Tronson explained.