I'm not so sure about this. If you look historically, in game deaths seem very common in early football. As the game has gotten better pads, players have also b

I'm not so sure about this. If you look historically, in game deaths seem very common in early football. As the game has gotten better pads, players have also been getting much MUCH bigger, which is increasing risk, but we haven't seen regular documented deaths during games like in the 1890s~1930s every few years. Now we get lots of deaths due to outside issues though (lots of car accidents and shootings on that list in recent years; lots of recent suicides on the NFL list just above too). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_football_players_who_died_during_their_careers#College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_football_play... EDIT: I realize we're talking long term vs short term, but I wasn't able to find pre-compiled data comparing timelines of major advances in football pads and injury rates.