There is only so much safety when you're talking about 300 pounds meeting 250 pounds. The problem with football is physics.
Racing did it, they regulated the max amount of fuel, they reduced the top speeds, they added safety barriers, etc...
Do it with football. Change their gear, change the allowed "hits", remove their cleats, etc... I don't actually watch football so I'm not sure what would help or wouldn't, but don't act like this is just impossible to resolve.
Yeah, people would probably hate these kinds of solutions right now, but if you get the public opinion on your side, and you start moving in that direction people will change, they will realize being able to watch a safer form of football with their favorite players in it beats being able to watch "current football" but with all their favorite players horribly injured with their lives ruined.
1) Is the impact to the brain higher because of the protective equipment? Would people tackle as ferociously without it? You are allowed very little of that gear in Rugby. Head clashes in particular are rare in Rugby, without the helmet you put your head to the side of someone when you tackle!
2) American football players seem to carry a lot of body mass for fast people. Is it possible that their advanced sports science is a bit too pharmaceutical in nature? I wouldn't want to suggest anything, but is there a chance steroid use is widespread? If this is the case then clamping down here would presumably lessen the hits?
Yes.
> Would people tackle as ferociously without it?
No.
Back in the day, some ~100 years ago, American football wore leather "helmets", which weren't hard helmets as we think of them today.
From time to time, a player would die from a skull fracture after a rough tackle. Then they implemented hard helmets to prevent people from dying.
The unintended consequences of that was it allowed for rougher tackles and repetitive, regular brain trauma.
Same thing happened with boxing. Back in bare-knuckle days, human fists couldn't last too long against the skull. After they introduced gloves to protect hands and have the fights last longer, the weakest link became the brain.
In the UK Rugby fills an interesting social space. In southern England Rugby Union is a game played by posh schools (and indeed named after one), and remained amateur(ish) until 1995, in Wales it was a working class game and a way-of-life. In northern England they play a completely different game called 'Rugby League' which was always professional, further north in Scotland they play rugby Union again. In Ireland again it is associated with posh schools and English occupation! Occasionally (as is the case this summer) all of the nations team up as the 'British and Irish Lions' to go and take on the mighty All-Blacks of New Zealand, or in other years Australia and South Africa. It does strike me that with several US sports you seem deprived of the drama of regular international competition...
Out of curiosity, how severe is the average injury in Rugby?
I would say the most common injuries by far are related to muscle strains, tendons and ligaments etc like you could see in any sport. Cuts to the head are fairly common, as are the fabulous 'cauliflower ears' caused from bleeding inside your ear. But this is from being squashed and abraded, not hit. I haven't watched too much American football, but it seems a lot more stop-start, with considerably more changing of players. In Rugby you are running around for 80 minutes, so more athletic injuries rather than collision related. Perhaps having to pace yourself also lessens the hits? Spinal injuries seem very rare, and are much more likely due to some kind of contortion rather than impact.
Concussion does happen, but normally seems to be an accidental clash of heads or falling on a knee, perhaps. When it happened to me it was a result of me running to join a ruck (think lots of people pushing each other over a ball on the the floor after a player has been tackled), which kind of split in half and someones head slipped through to catch me in the face. In the top level, if the referee sees you suffer a head injury or get knocked out you are sent off to see the doctor for 10 minutes. If he suspects concussion you wont play again for two weeks. A Welsh international (George North, Wales is Rugby mad btw) got a concussion on his return from a concussion break and this resulted in him spending the best part of a year out of the game!
I don't think head on head hits are common at all. When you tackle in Rugby you have to attempt to wrap your arms around the player, and tackles are much more 'tacklers shoulder to midriff or legs'. I think being winded or hurting your stomach muscles is most likely. you certainly cannot tackle above shoulder high. Re: protective equipment, I wore non at all. Gum shields are common, as is electrical tape around your ears and some petroleum jelly on your eye-brows! Now a number of players where a 'scrum-cap' which is a close fitting lightly padded cloth device to help stop cuts and abrasion to your head. Professional players often wear a kind of shoulder pad designed to protect your collar bone, but it barely makes a dent in your shirt it is so small!
Considering the level of competition in American football I would be surprised to find a significant number of players not taking steroids.
As a general rule, the more elite your level of something, the lesser the difference in ability between you and your peers. Also, at the elite levels you get diminishing returns on your "investment" of more training.
Thus, at the level of, say, the NFL, can you really imagine an athlete turning down a drug that will boost his performance by, say, 5%, when he is training 100 hours per week to improve by 1%?
Also, athletes who do not take steroids are probably weeded out at the high school and college levels, so by the time you make it to the NFL you probably have few, if any, "natural" players.
W.r.t. steroid testing, I could be wrong but last time I read on the subject the tests used were easily circumvented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_American_football#V...
More games means coaches have to optimize for not injuring players.
Attempting to force teams to bench their best players for injury prevention / adding games to the schedule that will be played by the bench players will also lower the quality of pro games, and turn off even more fans to the NFL - which is already not doing great.
Additionally, nobody was talking about forcing coaches to bench players, we're talking about setting up the system such that coaches feel it's in the best interest of the team to occasionally bench (rest) players. Also, you don't send an entire team of lower quality players out at once, you cycle them through such that you're still always playing at a high level, just maybe not the peak possible (which you often aren't because of injuries anyway). There may be additional benefit to running more games when it comes to fan viewing and involvement, I'm not sure, but there's probably good data on it for many other sports.
Dismissing safety as impossible "because physics" is just silly. Technical solutions are the easy part. It's the culture change that is difficult.
You can for example mandate braces which would prevent most joint injury. The added weight while minor slightly reduces performance so it can't catch on at an individual or team level.
One of the issues with football is that because they're wearing helmets they think that contact on the head is safe. It's incredibly not.