5 Ways to Make Football Safer

A football in a tee — (Image credit: Dan Thornberg/Shutterstock.com)

Bone-crunching hits and flying tackles are part of what makes football fun to watch, but they are also part of the reason the sport is now facing scrutiny over the serious head injuries that it can bring.

Now, in response to concerns from the public and players about injuries, research into making football safer has become a leading topic of discussion for the NFL and many sports medicine organizations, experts say.

An investigation published last week by The New York Times revealed that concussion research from the National Football League (NFL) was incomplete to the point of being misleading. According to the Times, data that the NFL used in 13 peer-reviewed articles, which supported the NFL's claims that brain injuries from football cause no extended harm to players, left out over 100 diagnosed concussions, including the injury that ended the career of Steve Young.

Latest Videos From

Watch full video here:

"Most [doctors] accept a headache after a potential head injury as a 'concussion' or 'mild traumatic brain injury,'" said Dr. Jamshid Ghajar, a neurosurgeon and director of the Stanford Concussion and Brain Performance Center. "However, headaches are not specific to brain trauma — 90 percent of [the] public have headaches at least once annually," he said. This lack of consistent concussion diagnosis standards likely leads to the underreporting of concussion.

And researchers at UCLA are working on an energy-absorbing microlattice material, called Architected Lattice, that would replace the foam inside football helmets and absorb some of the energy from impacts. This lattice has been shown to reduce peak impact force by 26 percent compared to the conventional foam now used in football helmets, said Larry Carlson, director of advanced materials at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and part of the team developing this lattice.

Both of these helmet innovations were Round One winners at the Head Health Challenge II, a contest for researchers working on improving designs, and the Vicis Zero1 was one of the final winners of the contest. But helmets are not going to prevent concussions on their own. Ghajar said their real purpose is to protect against skull fractures and scalp injuries, and that the concussions result from the movement of the neck.

Both Swartz and Ghajar agree that improving neck support is important for reducing concussions in football. "The flexible neck is producing concussions," Ghajar said. Restricting neck motion, or reducing how quickly the neck motion speeds up or slows down, could help prevent concussion, he said. Ghajar pointed to NASCAR's Head and Neck Support (HANS) device, which is a restraint that tethers a driver's helmet to a shoulder harness. This device is not suitable for contact sports, but could give researchers ideas for stabilizing the neck to prevent concussions.

The United States Army Research Lab, in research funded by the Head Health Challenge II, has begun work on a tether system that uses fluid-filled elastic straps to reduce sudden head motion. The straps would attach from a player's waist and torso (via a lightweight harness) to the bottom of his helmet and act like a shock absorber, because the fluid in the straps becomes increasingly solid when stressed.

Some research suggests that football players may reduce their risk of concussion by wearing better mouth guards. For example, a 2014 study published in General Dentistryfound that high school football players who used custom-made mouth guards suffered half as many mild traumatic brain injuries and concussions as those who used over-the-counter mouth guards (3.6 percent versus 8.3 percent). The study included 412 players, 220 of whom were randomly assigned to wear custom mouth guards. However, research published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine in 2014 found the opposite effect: A study of more than 2,000 high school football players found that custom-fitted mouth guards increased sport-related concussion risk by 60 percent, compared generic guards.

Mouth guards can prevent injuries to the teeth, lips, tongue and jaw, but their usefulness in terms of concussion prevention remains unclear. "Use of mouth guards is probably one of the areas that has the least amount of quality evidence," Swartz said. In 2012, mouth guard company Brain-Pad came under fire from the Federal Trade Commission for claims that its product could protect against concussions.

Called the Helmetless Tackling Training (HuTT) intervention program, this research consists of having players practice tackling and blocking without their helmets. In one study with 50 University of New Hampshire football players, half of the players were assigned to do 5-minute tackling drills at 50 to 75 percent effort without helmets or shoulder pads, twice a week during the preseason and once a week during the season. Compared to the 25 players who were assigned to practice noncontact football skills in lieu of these drills, the helmetless drill group suffered 28 percent fewer head impacts.

TOPICS