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Comment by ThrustVectoring | Hacker News Reader

I think the rules could get reworked to make it less dangerous for brain injury. Take a cue from Australian Rules Football: remove all padding and make high tackles that endanger the head illegal.

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Head contact, boarding, and checking from behind are already illegal.

I agree hockey could survive the elimination of checking, and think it probably will happen eventually. It's not even introduced until 14U age and younger kids learn to play with body contact only.

It would be a different game but all the skilled puck handling, skating, passing, shooting and speed would remain.

Rugby and league have no padding and those rules. It doesn't appear to anywhere close to enough.

It's still a risky and violent sport, but the issue of hard-to-identify-and-track accumulated damage is lessened.

Rugby is a much better analogue to gridiron - it's essentially the same game. Two lines of players run at each other, with a certain number of attempts to run the ball downfield, and almost every 'play' has contact of players running in opposite directions. Aussie Rules is much more freeform and has fewer 'opposing hits'.

However, much as we aussies like to mock gridiron for the pads it requires, without the pads, players used to die relatively routinely. Take the pads away from gridiron and it would need to change and loosen up enough that it basically becomes rugby.

Well, if they switched to rugby, then they could play internationally against established rugby teams.

But I'm not sure American broadcasters could adjust to a game with only two halfs of 40min each, no stopping of the clock and nowhere to stuff their abundance of ads.

> abundance of ads

I wouldn't mock the Americans too much for their famous love of advertising. I haven't found a sport yet that is as much a slave to advertising as Aussie Rules. Try to find a square meter of space[1] at an AFL game without advertising - even the ball itself is adorned with the golden arches.

[1] Okay, some of the grass doesn't have advertising on it.....

We could just plaster the ads all over the jerseys like Europeans do.

Rugby is a much better analogue to gridiron - it's essentially the same game.

The huge and essential difference is that in gridiron the players in the 'scrum' start ~2m appart and run towards each other head first at full speed. And while most players in rugby can go several plays without taking a hit, linemen take a significant hit basically every single play.

>no padding

This is offered as a solution a lot, but I am not sure if it would actually be effective. Football helmets were introduce early in the 20th century because dozens of people were dying every year playing football. Football helmets put an end to those deaths caused by acute trauma, but the physics of the game and those collisions haven't changed. Football is just a more violent game than Rugby due to various reasons like position specialization, more frequent stoppages of play, and the inherent directions of play for the offense and defense. It is rare to have two players in rugby running full speed at each other head on. That happens in football on nearly every play and often multiple times per play.

> In the NFL 18.8% of injuries occur at or above the shoulders, the area where athletes wear the most protective equipment. In the AFL 11.5% of AFL injuries occur in this area, where they wear virtually no protection.

Source: https://medium.com/upstart-magazine/nfl-vs-afl-injury-compar...

Helmets enable players to weaponize their heads, like this recent hit (Vontaze Burfict's suspension earning HIT on Anthony Sherman): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7qQtadYqsI and many others demonstrate. I believe removing helmets would mitigate this behaviour and increase the long term health of football players. Looking for data on Aussie rules, this is not quite what I was hoping to find, but interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_rules_footb...

Without question Aussie rules has its share of devastating brain injuries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1aU0hz5Tf8. Plenty of concussions and fencing responses in that clip.

At 33, I've stopped watching North American football altogether because the violence turned me off. 10 years ago it was my second fav sports (to Hockey).

With relatively rested players lining up against each other on every down the situation is much different from players chasing each other on the field like they do in AFL.

WRs for example have a somewhat similar situation to AFL players since they are mostly being chased by the defense and they don't get nearly as many contact injuries as RBs for example. Not to mention they are protected by (frequently controversial) pass interference rules.

From what I gather, introduction of the helmets back in the day reduced injury rates.

There's also suspicion, if I recall correctly, that the routine repetitions of linemen taking knocks to the head in practice does more long term damage than what we see on game day. This may be more pronounced in high schools and to a lesser extent, college, where the coaching can be more suspect.

Yes, research has suggested that a number of smaller collisions can cause damage even if a player never suffers an actual concussion. A helmet also only protects you from external trauma. It acts as a second skull. But the problem isn't always from external trauma. If you are moving at speed and you are put to an immediate stop due to a collision with another player, your entire body experiences a lot of force. Your brain will end up colliding with the inside of your skull due to inertia regardless of whether you were hit in the head or not. That is why simply cutting headshots out of the game or removing helmets won't be enough to protect players. It really gets down to the fundamental nature of football and the physics of its collisions.

Analogy I've stolen from a Uni. of Toronto brain doctor: fill a mason jar (skull) with water (cerebrospinal fluid), and throw in a golf ball (brain). Shake the jar, the golf ball will hit the side of the jar.

You could bubble wrap the jar (helmet), but the ball will still collide with the inside of the jar.

> It is rare to have two players in rugby running full speed at each other head on.

When they run towards each other, due to the rules, they don't just try and collide and call it a "tackle". I agree football is a more violent game intentionally but it's purely how the game is played and if you change the rules you'd have teams finding ways to play differently, with different skillsets prioritised.

I too was going to suggest the counter-intuitive 'remove the helmets' until you said that. Wasn't it the case that there were some form of padded helmet then? What was it like when there was no headgear of any sort? It is still a fact that there isn't this brain trauma issue in professional rugby. As a former player I assure you the contact is real and I suffer for it every day but thankfully not my brain - (well you be the judge). :)

As a big hockey fan, I completely agree with this. The pads players wore 30+ years ago were pretty much nothing so if you tried to hit someone hard it hurt you as well. My theory is that the NHL would see less concussions if they reduced the padding but such a counter-intuitive process is never going to happen.

I'm curious, did Australian Rules Football go to padding and then remove it? Because I think that once padding is put in place, it's very tough to get people to remove it.

AFL has never had padding.

One big reason for padding that is not directly related to player-on-player contact is getting hit with the puck. I play in beer league hockey (non-check) as a defense man and I wear full shoulder and chest pads to protect from the puck, not hits from other players. At the pro level, taking a hit from a puck without padding could easily cause very severe injury.

The rules could get reworked, but I seriously doubt if they ever will. Maybe its possible to slowly change the game over time, but completely changing the rules overnight would be too dramatic and risky for any league to really get behind. The best chance is probably for the NFL to come up with a long term plan to fix things, but that'd require them to admit the problem, which I don't think will ever happen.

Go back to leather helmets and cotton pads and it's a different game. No reason we need to turn their heads into sledgehammers. We do that because then they feel more comfortable with the big unsafe hits and the flying around but we could get back to the real game with the ruck style running game and wideouts with hand fighting all the way down the sideline and half the commercials and I bet ratings would start going up.

Ratings may go up, but with half as many commercials the profits would also go down. The league only cares about ratings insofar as it helps their bottom line.

I'm not saying these changes would be a bad thing, only that I have doubts it'll ever happen.

meh if they sold it for $2 or $4 per game directly to the customer they would get the money anyway. They need to look at new ways to monitize and it probably involves cutting the commercials and the middle men and putting the money directly in their pockets. The only reason they need cable is for 1. distribution which is not an issue since the internet. 2. to splice the commercials in which could easily be done. Sell the games directly and get 100% of your add revenue and you'd probably make more.

If viewership continues to go down, and parent stop letting their kids play at lower levels because of health conserns, they will also lose money.

Great idea! Less head injuries, but still a hard-hittin' sport https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1aU0hz5Tf8

Virtually every example of a "big hit" in that video ends with the person who got hit showing the fencing response (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fencing_response). That body pose indicates a pretty severe concussion.

In fact, the most popular video on YouTube about the fencing response has a shocking amount of overlap with the "big hits" video you shared. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlXjwAlOflA

Frankly, your video was kind of hard to watch. It's basically 3 minutes of people getting their brains rattled in their skulls.

That's true! I didn't think about it because it was a collection of "rare" events - hitting above the shoulders is not a valid tackle. Usually won't get these hits in a game.

But still, obviously it certainly exists, and I'm sure there is a lot of head trauma every year.

I have never seen this video. I always had heard that without the gear that rugby was less brutal than football -- but seriously I don't know. Those hits looked devastating... I could not watch that sport.

That's not rugby, it's Aussie Rules, but those are illegal tackles in both sports. I don't know why the poster chose a video of vicious fouls to make his point about safety.

What % of players are going to get such a tackle once in their careers? How many are going to get five?

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