Players tackle harder and in more dangerous manners (head first) because the pads lessen the apparent impact. They make it not hurt, but they don't actually prevent damage.
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 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.
i. would. never.
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.