As I come from the UK and am not familiar with NFL, what moves specific to this sport cause this? This issue is not prevalent at all in Rugby, which is arguably more dangerous (no pads or helmets)
One feature that makes a difference is the American football system of downs: the next play begins where the last play ended, to the inch, and on many plays there is a nonlinear point. One inch short of a first down is vastly better for the defenders than just making it. In rugby someone taking another foot or two to go down isn't going to hurt the outcome the way it can in football. The goal in football is to stop the person in as little space as possible, which means maximizing the deceleration and thus the impact to the brain.
With the NFL, they also spent a decade and a half purposefully covering the link up and publishing biased science trying to obscure the link, so there is scandal on top of the horrors of the physical consequences.
In football, once the receiver or running back has the ball, he is going to take a hit - likely from a defender who has been in full sprint for a good distance. Once he has the ball, he has 11 other players containing/funneling him and focused on crushing him.
In rugby, the ball carrier can pass or kick. That makes the game more one-on-one because the opposing team has to cover their guy. The width of the field needs to be considered. As a defender, you can't be reckless, you have to make sure you make the tackle. This means you go lower, you tackle the waist and slide down the legs of the runner.
I played at a decent level of rugby when I was younger... rugby players are not afraid of getting hurt. They do not ease up on a tackle because "i'm not wearing a helmet".
It's hard to gauge the effects of these kinds of changes without letting them play out, but I for one would love to see the NFL try this combination for a year.
How would that even work?
They did the same with offensive lines after all.
[0] http://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/16029747/rugby-nfl-concu...
The first thing we were all taught to do was tackle. The technique was to wrap your arms around the opponents legs, particularly below the knee as that would guarantee their stoppage. This was a simple but very effective technique. We never tried to go for the head, or lower our heads and hit them.
I never played football so I can't say if this technique would work there but it's at least one reason no one on my team suffered a concussion in two seasons.
CTE is almost by definition not concussion-related. The effects of concussions are part of the concussion.
This is oft-cited but before helmets, NFL players were dying at a pretty rapid pace [0], and this is before advanced strength and conditioning.
NFL players rush into each other at full speed knowing the risks. Why would that change if you removed protective padding that has been proven to do very little?
[0]: One such article on the topic: https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/19-football-players-died-in-...
http://www.history.com/news/how-teddy-roosevelt-saved-footba...
Injuries were also caused by a lot of plays that are illegal today - flying wedges and various dirty blocks (clipping, chop blocks).
300lbs, running 5seconds for 40 yard, 2% bodyfat -- straight at you -- head down -- helmet first. Oh yeah. They trained on smashing into bags for this for 10 years.
Lots are a bit faster and around 230 or 250 lbs though.
https://www.inverse.com/article/37934-nfl-funded-study-brain...
Really? Because someone did just that in the AFC championship a week ago in order to (successfully) take out Rob Gronkowski.
Do NFL athletes really have 2% bodyfat? That's elite bodybuilding physique, and only sustained temporarily for competition. I find it hard to believe that football players can compete with so little fat.
The American football is played in a series of short plays with long stretches of non-action between plays. This allows plays to be more explosive allowing players run at faster speeds for shorter distances. Also some of the rules lead to greater specialization, which favors some players become much larger (offensive linemen in particular) than rugby players. So the combination of greater mass and greater speed can lead to more dangerous play.
At least that's my take on it.
Sports you wouldn't necessarily expect, like ice skating, have problems with concussions.
There are also other factors. The forward pass often puts receivers in dangerous positions, as they often have to turn and track the ball when it isn't thrown perfectly. Also, the stop and start nature combined with the spread in position that the threat of the forward pass creates more high speed head-on collisions. Extreme specialization among the positions also mean that there are a lot of very large, very fast people out there whose job is just to hit as hard as possible.
Those game mechanics also combine negatively with the amount of money at stake due to the extreme commercialization. A lot of these players grew up in high school or younger programs being told that if they want to go pro and make the big money, they have to be out there hitting the hardest, or there's always someone to take their spot. That isn't really incorrect, but it leads to poor outcomes.
Boxing gloves, by contrast, can and do cause the same sort of faulty reasoning as football helmets when education isn't properly included: there's padding, therefore I can hit harder. Except, no, it (clearly) doesn't work that way. Certainly not when mass is a variable in the equation.
It is just as likely that the brain trauma differences are due to the dramatically less number of hits taken. This has more to do with the rules than the gloves.
We can be reasonably sure of that because boxing could change the glove types trivially and haven’t even in places that have changed other rules for safety (youth & Olympic boxing).
How did you arrive at that conclusion? It's fairly well established that boxing gloves have dramatically increased both number of punches to the head as well as the force of the punch. You don't bare-knuckle punch someone in the skull much, it hurts the person doing the punch not just the one being punched. Gloves change that dramatically, resulting in not just more punches to the head but also harder punches to the head (more weight behind the punch from the gloves themselves if nothing else).
Boxing hasn't changed back to bare-knuckle because it would make the sport more gruesome visually even though it would almost certainly be safer for the participants.
any change that would bring the head punch count down to ufc levels would likely have similar safety improvements.
The evidence is really sketchy but early research indicates Thai boxing has a bigger incidence of brain trauma than western boxing than ufc and boxing do. The glove is essentially the same.
The last thing I want to do is just let my helmet do its job. I'd rather do almost anything else to prevent that if I can, because there's a point when I realized that it simply keeps me alive. It doesn't save me from everything. A broken bone heals, road rash heals, CTE does not heal. If my options are to go head first into a car or lay down and take a slide, I'll take the slide every time.
I treat my helmet as just another line of defense, one of many that includes e.g. body gear, situational awareness, keeping up on riding ability, and things like that.
In case it's not clear to anyone reading, yes, I wear a helmet and gear when I ride. I'm not arguing against wearing helmets, only the incorrect assumptions made about them.
i. would. never.
I do hope helmet technology improves to handle inadvertent contact.
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2757235-rob-gronkowski-sa...
And furthermore, in that article Gronkowski is quoted as even preferring to take dangerous hits in the head like that, instead of risking re-injuring a bad knee. Not a great policy.
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1728218-rugby-player-welf...
I know time in the game is a factor, but idk what rugby is like for that. When do rugby players retire typically?
If it helps, here's the current squads for a few of the northern hemisphere teams with their ages listed. Lots in their 20s but a few current players have passed 30.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wales_national_rugby_union_tea...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland_national_rugby_union_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_national_rugby_union_t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England_national_rugby_union_t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_national_rugby_union_te...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy_national_rugby_union_tea...
Uh... what?
Lots of big hits happen on the line, both associated with tackles and not (a “pulling” offensive lineman hitting a defensive lineman or linebacker coming through an apparently open lane being a prime place big, non-tackle hits occur.)
Now, it may be true that because linemen are—compared to, e.g., wide recievers—built like tanks they visibly respond differently to the impacts (but that just means that something cumulatively bad for the brain won't be as likely to be limited by other more acute injuries), and it's definitely true that a lot of those impacts happen off the ball or as the play goes by, and so aren't as much a focus of attention and camera priority.
In Australian football, AFL not rugby, we have recently seen a change in the rules where dangerous contact to the head is to be avoided and tightening medical governence on diagnosis of concussion during games. The initial reaction from fans was that making the game less rough bordered on pedantic but there's now an acceptance that degenerative brain injuries as mentioned in the article are a huge concern.
I heard that in early boxing (no gloves) fighters very rarely knocked down opponents, because you don't want to attack head without gloves. Only after introduction of gloves deaths on the ring became an issue.
Which, face it, is actually a big draw for some folks. The lethality of the sport is by design.
Concussions are the most common injury in the England professional rugby league so I would be surprised if Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is not an issue. CTE injuries in American Football are more common because because defensive players (primarily) use their helmet as projectiles when making tackles either intentionally or by accident.
The pads allow for you to hit harder, and constantly.