7 ms·

Is It Time to Retire the Football Helmet?

42 points by edw519 16y ago

ryanwaggoner 16y ago
I've heard the same thing is true of boxing vs. MMA fights; because boxers wear heavily padded gloves, they end up throwing and receiving many (less powerful) blows in a fight because it doesn't hurt your hand to hit someone in those gloves. But MMA fighters wear minimal hand protection, which results in fewer (more powerful) blows. Surprisingly, it turns out that this may be healthier in the long run. This also reminds me of the whole "modern running shoe" vs. barefoot approach. Interesting what our bodies are optimized for.
- Prisen 16y ago
  The real killer is sparring, you don't go as hard but you do it a lot more than you fight. MMA fighters usually spar with boxing gloves, but since striking is only one part of MMA they can't afford to spend as much time training it as boxers.
- dejb 16y ago
  I think there are a lot or reasons that MMA is probably safer. These include - Flash KO's, leading to fast stoppages in MMA as opposed to standing counts in Boxing - Less emphasis on head strikes and more emphasis on wrestling/control/submissions in MMA. Even cuts can stop the fight. - Less rounds in MMA - Different culture. More 'college boy' wrestling than 'street kid' boxing. If you had boxing rules with MMA gloves you'd probably have more cuts but still a lot of brain damage.
  - presidentender 16y ago
    They didn't have any gloves in the earliest incarnations of MMA, and fighters would almost never hit each other in the head. The thin MMA gloves they have now do very little to protect the recipient of a blow, but a great deal to protect the knuckles of the striker from the effects of punching someone in the head. The crowds want to see a little bit of that blood.
  - bryanwb 16y ago
    mma gloves are there to protect the puncher's knuckles and not the punchee's face
- giardini 16y ago
  ".. boxers wear heavily padded gloves, they end up throwing and receiving many (less powerful) blows in a fight because it doesn't hurt your hand to hit someone in those gloves." No. While it is true that their hands are injured less, the gloves allow them to deliver _more_ _powerful_ blows. The use of gloves brought brain injury to boxing in a big way. In the days preceding use of gloves, knockouts and concussions were less frequent, fights lasted much longer and required considerable endurance as well as fighting skill.
  - Someone 16y ago
    The padding of gloves in itself does not make blows to the head harder, it makes them less painful for the competitor delivering them, and that leads to harder blows. Hit someone hard on the head with a bare fist, and chances are that you break your hand. Because of that, before gloves came into use, boxers would go for body blows, rather than blows to the head.
  - defen 16y ago
    Bare-knuckle boxing is also a far bloodier affair than Marquess of Queensberry rules, even though it is much safer when it comes to brain injuries. I can imagine mainstream contemporary crowds being too squeamish to watch a real bare-knuckle match.
- pbiggar 16y ago
  All your repliers seem to disagree, but I believe you're right. When I started doing MMA I read a number of academic papers, which I believe are the source of what you're saying above. (Sadly I don't have citations, it was years ago).
icegreentea 16y ago
This is what rugby players have been teasing football players about forever. And really, the only way to make it work is if they also get rid of most of the padding. Because even with a rugby form tackle , if you smack into a full padded up football player, that's going to cause some trauma.
- Retric 16y ago
  I like the idea of taking it to the other extreme, attach the helmet to the shoulder and back padding so you can swivel the helmet but not change it's angle relative to the body. Then add even more padding and focus the sport on armored tanks flailing at each other. You would still have the issue of people flying end over end and landing on their heads so replace the playing surface with gymnastic mats. Of course we could still get some joint injury’s so add a protective exoskeleton to prevent over extension etc and then watch as people fling their body’s around and bounce off of each other. It might not be a sport at that point, but it would be an interesting spectacle.
  - 83457 16y ago
    ...and require a player to actually go through the uprights with the ball for field goals by way of strategically placed trampolines?
    - Retric 16y ago
      I like it, still if your going that far why not have them play inside a giant pinball machine?
- alex_stoddard 16y ago
  I played rugby all through school in Scotland. Starting at eight years old they had us spend months on tackling drills, and a lot of it was how not to hurt yourself in making a tackle. I wince just about every time I see an American football hit now I live in the U.S., just from the risk the tackler is taking with their body. However there are other significant differences between (union) rugby and American football which make removing protection dubious. There is no blocking in rugby so only the ball carrier faces being hit and is almost always aware the hit is coming. Also a man on the ground must release hold of the ball so there is no need to go all out to force a fumble.
michael_dorfman 16y ago
The problem, it seems to me, is the temporal separation between the impact injury and the symptoms, breaking any feedback loop. What we need is a redesigned football helmet that has razor-sharp metal spikes, pointed both in and out, causing immediate excruciating pain to both parties in any impact. That will stop concussions, guaranteed.
jordanlyall 16y ago
The logic "remove helmets and players won't make hard hits" is like saying "remove seatbelts from cars and people will drive safer."
- alex_stoddard 16y ago
  A very poor analogy. You never deliberately initiate a collision in a car. Also being surrounded by a car body gives you a false sense of invulnerability.
  - adolph 16y ago
    Sure, few people deliberately initiate a collision. However, that false sense of invulnerability you mention may induce behaviors that increase the likelihood of initiating a collision.
    - dmfdmf 16y ago
      I read once that the studies show that as cars got safer with better brakes, tires, seatbelts, airbags, etc. people increased their speed or took more risks to compensate so the overall risk stayed roughly the same.
- andrew1 16y ago
  In theory you're right, but probably not so in practice. Football players would see the consequences of the change much more quickly - they'd go from being able to dive at a player head first and have a cushioned impact to having their skull connect with something hard and feeling a lot of pain. I'd expect their behaviour would adapt in response to that. Similarly car drivers probably wouldn't drive any more safely until they experienced the consequences of crashing while not wearing a seat belt.
- adolph 16y ago
  That may not be far from the truth. It may be akin to the counter-intuitive removal of signs and signals from roads to increase safety: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html I think that the primary logic of the article is that helmets were designed to prevent skull fractures but an unintended outcome is an increase in concussions.
JoelSutherland 16y ago
Here is Gladwell on Football safety: Offensive Play How different are dogfighting and football? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_...
- thewordpainter 16y ago
  great read, joel. thanks for sharing. just about no one knows how to tell how a story better than gladwell (sidenote: seems like he'd make for a great pitch-man) the NFL is reacting with their gut right now. i know they're trying to send a message, but the officials are going to receive the brunt of the criticism when there's so much ambiguity between the rules right now. this is an issue that needs to be addressed after the season...maybe that gives a YC-startup time to put together a new helmet ;)
danielnicollet 16y ago
My take on this: The human body was made to run without add-ons. Pads and helmets seem like a great idea at first but they cause NFL players run out of memory after they retire. Let's re-install the Football OS clean of all plugins and call it Rugby ;-)
- hugh3 16y ago
  Of course, rugby players also get a lot of brain injuries. I knew one kid at school (well okay, I knew of one kid at another school) who had his neck broken in a scrum. (That ended the "compulsory Rugby" policy at that particular school.)
  - brc 16y ago
    Yes, someone at my school broke his neck in a scrum as well. And I've heard plenty of similar stories over the news. On a rugby field, the most dangerous place is in the scrum.
- tvon 16y ago
  Removing pads you'd still have nothing that looked at all like Rugby.
robryan 16y ago
Most Australians don't get the point of all the helmets and padding in the american game. AFL has strong rules for protecting the head, to the point that players attempt to exploit this and ducking their head when they have nowhere to go hoping the tackling player will make contact with them and draw a free kick.
- tvon 16y ago
  Unfortunately these people have been playing with pads since they were kids, this isn't a change that could be introduced easily. I do think it is more or less the way things need to go though, but I don't actually see it happening.
dejb 16y ago
As a reluctant and occasional watcher of AFL (QLD'er) I can say that the comparison to AFL has no value. The rules of AFL impose many constraints on the tackler and the pay-off amounts to less than the turnover of possession in soccer. The best comparison to US football would be Rugby League which favours more 'hard hits' than the more internationally renowned Rugby Union. I've yet to see studies compare the results but my impression is that the League player suffer significantly less brain injuries during their professional careers.
konad 16y ago
http://crimeletes.com/?watch=desean-jackson-gets-jacked-up http://crimeletes.com/?watch=desean-jackson-gets-jacked-up There's no way on earth that tackle would have been tried sans helmet.
83457 16y ago
I think the last paragraph really sums up why this drastic of a change is not going to happen: "Without the helmet, they wouldn't hit their head in stupid plays," says P. David Halstead, technical director for the Nocsae, the group that sets helmet-safety standards. But without helmets, the game "wouldn't be football," he says. There may be a sport similar to American football without helmets right now that becomes very popular in coming years. However I don't see such a drastic change ever being applied to American football directly.
joeycfan 16y ago
Yes. The fact that anyone can get a concussion in 2010 with a modern helmet on is crazy. Fix the helmet or get rid of it.
mattmaroon 16y ago
'there may be a greater prevalence of head injuries in the American game because the players hit each other with forces up to 100% greater. "If they didn't have helmets on, they wouldn't do that,"' The second part of that is dead wrong. When millions of dollars and hall of fame spots are on the line, people will sacrifice their bodies. Boxers and MMA fighters knowingly take up a sport where their retired legendary heroes can barely form a coherent sentence after age 50. They know going in they're going to get their brain damaged and they do it anyway, and boxing's not half as prestigious as football here. Football is America's premier sport, and the Super Bowl is America's most prestigious sporting event. People will collide just as hard without helmets as they do with in order to win a Lombardi trophy regardless of the cost to themselves. It's silly to think that if millions of young Americans will put their life on the line to defend our country, that hundreds won't put their life on the line to achieve fame and fortune.
- sasvari 16y ago
  Football is America's premier sport, and the Super Bowl is America's most prestigious sporting event. People will collide just as hard without helmets as they do with in order to win a Lombardi trophy regardless of the cost to themselves. Isn't it that when you hit your head without a helmet, it's going to hurt much more and thus you avoid getting hit (at least that's the argument used here)? As far as I understood, the problem with the helmets is the hits you don't feel as painfully with the helmet as you would feel without, but which are very dangerous if they occur very frequently. I don't know if you can compare that to MMA or boxing the way you do, but I'm not a professional football player either.
  - baddox 16y ago
    As mattmaroon just said, American football players will sacrifice themselves (i.e. tolerate the pain) for the game.
    - aliston 16y ago
      I think the argument is that, by and large, Australian football is no less violent than American football. However, helmets incentivise poor tackling technique (i.e. leading with the helmet). If you took off the facemask, the game would be just as quick/painful etc. but you wouldn't see defensive ends driving quarterbacks into the ground with their helmets... instead, they'd be wrapping up and tackling the way they did back in the day, before the "human bowling ball" approach became popular. EDIT: by the way, kids in peewee football are taught from day 1 to tackle with the head up. The "big hits" you see on ESPN are fundamentally poor tackles... they just seem to get the "oohs and ahss" because they look cool to people who don't understand football.
balding_n_tired 16y ago
You could change the NFL a great deal by changing the substitution rules, and making players play both ways as they commonly did before about 1960. You'd probably see the linemen come down to about linebacker size, and the skill positions to about defensive back size. Meanwhile I'm waiting for the obsessive parents of America to read up on the cumulative effects of heading soccer balls.
charlesju 16y ago
They might as well just start the NFL as flag-football.
bryanwb 16y ago
I highly doubt that big-time football will ever change while it is still making so much $. Yuppie American parents _are_ paying attention to the risks of head injuries and they are voting with their kids feet by putting their kids into lacrosse and soccer. Football won't change until it starts losing irrecoverable ground to lacrosse and soccer.
- hugh3 16y ago
  So we'll see growing class differentiation in sport choices between those who grew up with rich parents (better protect young Tyler's brain so he can grow up to be a lawyer) and those who grew up with poor parents (I'll bet young LeMonjello could be an NFL star someday!)?
  - bryanwb 16y ago
    I think we already see that. This certainly was the case with boxing.
kenjackson 16y ago
If the NFL ever did get rid of helmets, then I'm starting a new league with helmets.
bbuffone 16y ago
The solution is simple - sports should ban ALL hits to the head. Zero tolerance, it is uncalled for and brings nothing to the game
- Travis 16y ago
  Would this really solve anything? It would reduce the rate of serious hits (and thus concussions). But by what amount? Any time you have men this size, who are this motivated, moving this quickly, you'll have serious injuries. Not to mention the fact that the elephant in the NFLPA's room is that its starting to look like subconcussive impacts are a major part of the problem. The big hits and helmet-to-helmet draw the attention, sure, but the 60 hits per practice are what drive much of the damage.
  - bbuffone 16y ago
    You are trying to remove the initiation of contact to the head. This does a couple things 1.) Simplifies and remove ambiguity from any call. 2.) Reduce the initial impact to the head. Is it going to eliminate all head injures no, but is a clear way to define a rule.

42 points by edw519 16y ago

I've heard the same thing is true of boxing vs. MMA fights; because boxers wear heavily padded gloves, they end up throwing and receiving many (less powerful) blows in a fight because it doesn't hurt your hand to hit someone in those gloves. But MMA fighters wear minimal hand protection, which results in fewer (more powerful) blows. Surprisingly, it turns out that this may be healthier in the long run. This also reminds me of the whole "modern running shoe" vs. barefoot approach. Interesting what our bodies are optimized for.

Prisen 16y ago
The real killer is sparring, you don't go as hard but you do it a lot more than you fight. MMA fighters usually spar with boxing gloves, but since striking is only one part of MMA they can't afford to spend as much time training it as boxers.
dejb 16y ago
I think there are a lot or reasons that MMA is probably safer. These include - Flash KO's, leading to fast stoppages in MMA as opposed to standing counts in Boxing - Less emphasis on head strikes and more emphasis on wrestling/control/submissions in MMA. Even cuts can stop the fight. - Less rounds in MMA - Different culture. More 'college boy' wrestling than 'street kid' boxing. If you had boxing rules with MMA gloves you'd probably have more cuts but still a lot of brain damage.
- presidentender 16y ago
  They didn't have any gloves in the earliest incarnations of MMA, and fighters would almost never hit each other in the head. The thin MMA gloves they have now do very little to protect the recipient of a blow, but a great deal to protect the knuckles of the striker from the effects of punching someone in the head. The crowds want to see a little bit of that blood.
- bryanwb 16y ago
  mma gloves are there to protect the puncher's knuckles and not the punchee's face
giardini 16y ago
".. boxers wear heavily padded gloves, they end up throwing and receiving many (less powerful) blows in a fight because it doesn't hurt your hand to hit someone in those gloves." No. While it is true that their hands are injured less, the gloves allow them to deliver _more_ _powerful_ blows. The use of gloves brought brain injury to boxing in a big way. In the days preceding use of gloves, knockouts and concussions were less frequent, fights lasted much longer and required considerable endurance as well as fighting skill.
- Someone 16y ago
  The padding of gloves in itself does not make blows to the head harder, it makes them less painful for the competitor delivering them, and that leads to harder blows. Hit someone hard on the head with a bare fist, and chances are that you break your hand. Because of that, before gloves came into use, boxers would go for body blows, rather than blows to the head.
- defen 16y ago
  Bare-knuckle boxing is also a far bloodier affair than Marquess of Queensberry rules, even though it is much safer when it comes to brain injuries. I can imagine mainstream contemporary crowds being too squeamish to watch a real bare-knuckle match.
pbiggar 16y ago
All your repliers seem to disagree, but I believe you're right. When I started doing MMA I read a number of academic papers, which I believe are the source of what you're saying above. (Sadly I don't have citations, it was years ago).

icegreentea 16y ago

This is what rugby players have been teasing football players about forever. And really, the only way to make it work is if they also get rid of most of the padding. Because even with a rugby form tackle , if you smack into a full padded up football player, that's going to cause some trauma.

Retric 16y ago
I like the idea of taking it to the other extreme, attach the helmet to the shoulder and back padding so you can swivel the helmet but not change it's angle relative to the body. Then add even more padding and focus the sport on armored tanks flailing at each other. You would still have the issue of people flying end over end and landing on their heads so replace the playing surface with gymnastic mats. Of course we could still get some joint injury’s so add a protective exoskeleton to prevent over extension etc and then watch as people fling their body’s around and bounce off of each other. It might not be a sport at that point, but it would be an interesting spectacle.
- 83457 16y ago
  ...and require a player to actually go through the uprights with the ball for field goals by way of strategically placed trampolines?
  - Retric 16y ago
    I like it, still if your going that far why not have them play inside a giant pinball machine?
alex_stoddard 16y ago
I played rugby all through school in Scotland. Starting at eight years old they had us spend months on tackling drills, and a lot of it was how not to hurt yourself in making a tackle. I wince just about every time I see an American football hit now I live in the U.S., just from the risk the tackler is taking with their body. However there are other significant differences between (union) rugby and American football which make removing protection dubious. There is no blocking in rugby so only the ball carrier faces being hit and is almost always aware the hit is coming. Also a man on the ground must release hold of the ball so there is no need to go all out to force a fumble.

michael_dorfman 16y ago

The problem, it seems to me, is the temporal separation between the impact injury and the symptoms, breaking any feedback loop. What we need is a redesigned football helmet that has razor-sharp metal spikes, pointed both in and out, causing immediate excruciating pain to both parties in any impact. That will stop concussions, guaranteed.

jordanlyall 16y ago

The logic "remove helmets and players won't make hard hits" is like saying "remove seatbelts from cars and people will drive safer."

alex_stoddard 16y ago
A very poor analogy. You never deliberately initiate a collision in a car. Also being surrounded by a car body gives you a false sense of invulnerability.
- adolph 16y ago
  Sure, few people deliberately initiate a collision. However, that false sense of invulnerability you mention may induce behaviors that increase the likelihood of initiating a collision.
  - dmfdmf 16y ago
    I read once that the studies show that as cars got safer with better brakes, tires, seatbelts, airbags, etc. people increased their speed or took more risks to compensate so the overall risk stayed roughly the same.
andrew1 16y ago
In theory you're right, but probably not so in practice. Football players would see the consequences of the change much more quickly - they'd go from being able to dive at a player head first and have a cushioned impact to having their skull connect with something hard and feeling a lot of pain. I'd expect their behaviour would adapt in response to that. Similarly car drivers probably wouldn't drive any more safely until they experienced the consequences of crashing while not wearing a seat belt.
adolph 16y ago
That may not be far from the truth. It may be akin to the counter-intuitive removal of signs and signals from roads to increase safety: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html I think that the primary logic of the article is that helmets were designed to prevent skull fractures but an unintended outcome is an increase in concussions.

JoelSutherland 16y ago

Here is Gladwell on Football safety: Offensive Play How different are dogfighting and football? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_...

thewordpainter 16y ago
great read, joel. thanks for sharing. just about no one knows how to tell how a story better than gladwell (sidenote: seems like he'd make for a great pitch-man) the NFL is reacting with their gut right now. i know they're trying to send a message, but the officials are going to receive the brunt of the criticism when there's so much ambiguity between the rules right now. this is an issue that needs to be addressed after the season...maybe that gives a YC-startup time to put together a new helmet ;)

danielnicollet 16y ago

My take on this: The human body was made to run without add-ons. Pads and helmets seem like a great idea at first but they cause NFL players run out of memory after they retire. Let's re-install the Football OS clean of all plugins and call it Rugby ;-)

hugh3 16y ago
Of course, rugby players also get a lot of brain injuries. I knew one kid at school (well okay, I knew of one kid at another school) who had his neck broken in a scrum. (That ended the "compulsory Rugby" policy at that particular school.)
- brc 16y ago
  Yes, someone at my school broke his neck in a scrum as well. And I've heard plenty of similar stories over the news. On a rugby field, the most dangerous place is in the scrum.
tvon 16y ago
Removing pads you'd still have nothing that looked at all like Rugby.

robryan 16y ago

Most Australians don't get the point of all the helmets and padding in the american game. AFL has strong rules for protecting the head, to the point that players attempt to exploit this and ducking their head when they have nowhere to go hoping the tackling player will make contact with them and draw a free kick.

tvon 16y ago
Unfortunately these people have been playing with pads since they were kids, this isn't a change that could be introduced easily. I do think it is more or less the way things need to go though, but I don't actually see it happening.

dejb 16y ago

As a reluctant and occasional watcher of AFL (QLD'er) I can say that the comparison to AFL has no value. The rules of AFL impose many constraints on the tackler and the pay-off amounts to less than the turnover of possession in soccer. The best comparison to US football would be Rugby League which favours more 'hard hits' than the more internationally renowned Rugby Union. I've yet to see studies compare the results but my impression is that the League player suffer significantly less brain injuries during their professional careers.

konad 16y ago

http://crimeletes.com/?watch=desean-jackson-gets-jacked-up http://crimeletes.com/?watch=desean-jackson-gets-jacked-up There's no way on earth that tackle would have been tried sans helmet.

83457 16y ago

I think the last paragraph really sums up why this drastic of a change is not going to happen: "Without the helmet, they wouldn't hit their head in stupid plays," says P. David Halstead, technical director for the Nocsae, the group that sets helmet-safety standards. But without helmets, the game "wouldn't be football," he says. There may be a sport similar to American football without helmets right now that becomes very popular in coming years. However I don't see such a drastic change ever being applied to American football directly.

joeycfan 16y ago

Yes. The fact that anyone can get a concussion in 2010 with a modern helmet on is crazy. Fix the helmet or get rid of it.

mattmaroon 16y ago

'there may be a greater prevalence of head injuries in the American game because the players hit each other with forces up to 100% greater. "If they didn't have helmets on, they wouldn't do that,"' The second part of that is dead wrong. When millions of dollars and hall of fame spots are on the line, people will sacrifice their bodies. Boxers and MMA fighters knowingly take up a sport where their retired legendary heroes can barely form a coherent sentence after age 50. They know going in they're going to get their brain damaged and they do it anyway, and boxing's not half as prestigious as football here. Football is America's premier sport, and the Super Bowl is America's most prestigious sporting event. People will collide just as hard without helmets as they do with in order to win a Lombardi trophy regardless of the cost to themselves. It's silly to think that if millions of young Americans will put their life on the line to defend our country, that hundreds won't put their life on the line to achieve fame and fortune.

sasvari 16y ago
Football is America's premier sport, and the Super Bowl is America's most prestigious sporting event. People will collide just as hard without helmets as they do with in order to win a Lombardi trophy regardless of the cost to themselves. Isn't it that when you hit your head without a helmet, it's going to hurt much more and thus you avoid getting hit (at least that's the argument used here)? As far as I understood, the problem with the helmets is the hits you don't feel as painfully with the helmet as you would feel without, but which are very dangerous if they occur very frequently. I don't know if you can compare that to MMA or boxing the way you do, but I'm not a professional football player either.
- baddox 16y ago
  As mattmaroon just said, American football players will sacrifice themselves (i.e. tolerate the pain) for the game.
  - aliston 16y ago
    I think the argument is that, by and large, Australian football is no less violent than American football. However, helmets incentivise poor tackling technique (i.e. leading with the helmet). If you took off the facemask, the game would be just as quick/painful etc. but you wouldn't see defensive ends driving quarterbacks into the ground with their helmets... instead, they'd be wrapping up and tackling the way they did back in the day, before the "human bowling ball" approach became popular. EDIT: by the way, kids in peewee football are taught from day 1 to tackle with the head up. The "big hits" you see on ESPN are fundamentally poor tackles... they just seem to get the "oohs and ahss" because they look cool to people who don't understand football.

balding_n_tired 16y ago

You could change the NFL a great deal by changing the substitution rules, and making players play both ways as they commonly did before about 1960. You'd probably see the linemen come down to about linebacker size, and the skill positions to about defensive back size. Meanwhile I'm waiting for the obsessive parents of America to read up on the cumulative effects of heading soccer balls.

charlesju 16y ago

They might as well just start the NFL as flag-football.

bryanwb 16y ago

I highly doubt that big-time football will ever change while it is still making so much $. Yuppie American parents _are_ paying attention to the risks of head injuries and they are voting with their kids feet by putting their kids into lacrosse and soccer. Football won't change until it starts losing irrecoverable ground to lacrosse and soccer.

hugh3 16y ago
So we'll see growing class differentiation in sport choices between those who grew up with rich parents (better protect young Tyler's brain so he can grow up to be a lawyer) and those who grew up with poor parents (I'll bet young LeMonjello could be an NFL star someday!)?
- bryanwb 16y ago
  I think we already see that. This certainly was the case with boxing.

kenjackson 16y ago

If the NFL ever did get rid of helmets, then I'm starting a new league with helmets.

bbuffone 16y ago

The solution is simple - sports should ban ALL hits to the head. Zero tolerance, it is uncalled for and brings nothing to the game

Travis 16y ago
Would this really solve anything? It would reduce the rate of serious hits (and thus concussions). But by what amount? Any time you have men this size, who are this motivated, moving this quickly, you'll have serious injuries. Not to mention the fact that the elephant in the NFLPA's room is that its starting to look like subconcussive impacts are a major part of the problem. The big hits and helmet-to-helmet draw the attention, sure, but the 60 hits per practice are what drive much of the damage.
- bbuffone 16y ago
  You are trying to remove the initiation of contact to the head. This does a couple things 1.) Simplifies and remove ambiguity from any call. 2.) Reduce the initial impact to the head. Is it going to eliminate all head injures no, but is a clear way to define a rule.