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Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

The issue with the crash safety comparison is that helmets need to withstand many impacts before being replaced since it would be crazy to replace a helmet every play or two.

One possible answer is that, in order to truly solve this problem, the sport must do away with facemasks or helmets altogether.

Mike Ditka has long proposed removing the facemask, claiming that it has encouraged players to weaponize their heads for hits without fear of injury [0].

Researchers in the medical community have been echoing this as well, arguing that helmets do far more damage than they prevent [1].

More and more, the league, and the sport in general, look to treat the "symptoms" of this issue rather than addressing the root cause.

[0] http://bleacherreport.com/articles/495469-nfl-helmet-to-helm... [1] http://natajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.4085/1062-6050-51.1.06?co...

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Rugby does not have a helmet (except for the padded ones) and yet they still have concussion issues. I think there’s no clear answer although I agree about removing face mask.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC155428/

Football has never had them, there is occasional concussion but certainly long term damage from heading the ball.

Increasingly, the take is that pre 12yo kids shouldn't be having any blows to the head. Having a helmet likely doesn't help that much until you get to the point of a major hit.

I played organized American Football from the time I was a kid. Went to at the time the biggest high school in the state. I don't recall ever having any kind of head injuries despite getting hit a lot. Went out in college to try Rugby as a club sport. First practice, horrific concussion. I am a sample size of one, but I'd much rather my son play American Football than Rugby. If he gets to the college or pro level, then we can have a John Urshel type conversation about whether to continue.

I am not sure that you need a frank concussion to rack up long term damage though. Soccer players can acquire CTE from repeated headers of the ball, which rarely cause the kind of concussions you're takling about. I think the take away from all the present research is that it's generally a bad idea to bonk your head into things repeatedly, whatever the sport.

Have you considered the possibility that the difference is that you played American Football against smaller people?

When I graduated from high school I was 155 pounds - not exactly large. Which is part of my point here. For pro calibre players, significant physical growth often happens in those college and early pro years. If you've never stood next to a professional player - even the smaller ones - they are physical freaks, at least during their playing years. The typical pre-college player in this country is a much more normal-bodied person, thus assuming good technique, etc, they are no more at risk playing American Football than any other sport.

One thing to consider is the way you learned to tackle. Tackling technique is very different. If you used the same "Hit em hard" tackling that is common in American Football, I'm not surprised you had a concussion your first day of rugby practice. Your tackling technique didn't emphasize head protection.

Quite the opposite - I got tackled and hit my head on the ground. An injury that might have been prevented with a helmet.

I disagree that American Football tackling technique doesn't emphasize head protection. That is literally the first thing that every coach, every parent, every referee says to kids from the moment they start playing. It's ritual, IE: "low man wins," "keep your head up". An unsafe tackle is a pretty good way to get benched.

Concussions are accumulative and most of them are not macro evident. Lots of micro concussions could be worse than a single big one.

So I do not think your data means what you believe it means. There is a reason they call NFL "Not For Long".

I would not let my children play either American football or rugby, existing options like basketball or tennis. Luckily most of the world plays soccer.

Why do you believe soccer is actually any safer?

> Ronksley examined the relative concussion risk for some of the most popular youth sports: American football, rugby, hockey, lacrosse, soccer, basketball, baseball, softball, wrestling, field hockey, track, taekwondo, volleyball and cheerleading. Altogether, they reviewed data from 23 previously published studies on concussions in these sports, and then did a pooled analysis of injury rates from 13 of the prior studies.

> For each of the sports, they looked at concussion rates based on minutes of athletic exposure (AE), which includes competitions or practices with the potential for injury. The overall concussion risk across all of the sports included in the analysis was 0.23 injuries per 1,000 AEs. By comparison, the concussion risk per 1,000 AEs for rugby was 4.18, while it was 1.2 for hockey and 0.53 for American football.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-concussion-youth-s...

So on the one hand: research.

On the other hand: soccer (especially with sense enough not to be hitting headers all the time), has stupendously less physical contact than rugby or "football"... how could it be more damaging/dangerous with less contact?

Oh you fine folks of HN crack me up. Speak from personal experience, get downvoted into oblivion.

As I understand it, Rugby has a lower incident rate of concussion, and it's more the outcome of accidents than as a direct aspect of the tackling. That said, it's a very different style of play in Rugby to American Football.

Rugby players just don't deliberately go in with their head for the tackle, which is something you often see with NFL players (some NFL teams have experimented with helmet free tackling practice and seen it improve the game-time tackling effectiveness)

The lack of a stop of play after every tackle in Rugby also tends to ensure players are opting for tackles that they can recover from.

In American Football the expectation is for contact / hit with every play. Contact is just a staple part of every single play for every player. In Rugby, contact is largely down to those with the ball, and those specifically attempting to tackle them. It's a very different contact profile, even before you consider things like helmets and padding and what that does to the mindset of the players.

I see them lowering their heads into rucks or tackles. While there are fewer hits of course (in football, obstruction/blocking is encouraged off the ball) I think, anecdotally based on watching a lot of both, that rugby players and trainers don't account for concussion incidents as well. You see in both NFL and rugby league/union players shrugging off trainers attempting to take them out of a game, but I feel like I see many more rugby players returning to action after obvious grogginess akin to what I saw in the NFL a decade ago. There is under reporting in both sports too of course.

rugby has recently introduced a rule whereby there is a pitch-side doctor who will investigate replays of collisions where a concussion is suspected to have occurred. players are then removed from play for a mandatory 10 minute risk assessment which, if failed, means they cant return to play. quite a sensible move which should definitely be explored further and removes some of the burden of being a tough guy and playing through it

There are concussions in rugby, but they're much rarer. There are many rules protecting players, such as not being allowed to go in with the head or shoulders (you must tackle with your arms). You're not allowed to lift players off the ground, or tackle them around either their necks or heads.

On occasion players will still land badly or be tackled by multiple opponents. Studies are a bit rarer, but older players doesn't seem to nearly have the same level of issues as players from the NFL.

Downs in American Football make a huge difference too. Teams have 3/4 tries to go a total of 10 yards. A yard on a running play is very important so running full blast into someone to gain/prevent an extra yard is worth it. In Rugby, it doesn't really matter if you go 3 or 4 yards before being tackled.

Why is it crazy to replace the helmets on each major impact? This is a multi billion dollar industry

The problem is that replacing the helmets after each play or major impact would take time, and the clock doesn't always stop after a play during football. If we stopped the clock to replace a helmet, we open up the possibility of a team using this to slow down an advancing offense, or by an offense to gain a short timeout in a sense.

Basically it just doesn't mesh well with the flow of the game.

As someone who doesn't watch much football because the game doesn't seem to have any flow, it's interesting to hear that it is actually a concern.

https://www.sportsgrid.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/i3OtXs...

https://qz.com/150577/an-average-nfl-game-more-than-100-comm...

These studies never take into account that the game is still ongoing while the ball is not in play. A lot of the game takes place before the snap, as does the strategy. The offense after a big play sometimes struggles to get to the line of scrimmage in time to snap the ball again.

There is a flow and rhythm to the game for those of us who enjoy the sport. Though I can understand where you are coming from.

Parent is referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurry-up_offense

Another interesting thing: one major advantage of speed is actually slowing the game down.

E.g., if you move quickly between plays, you can catch the other team with too many men on the field during a substitution. in that case, you sometimes get a "free throw" (if the play works out, you decline the "too many players on field" penalty; but if the play doesn't work out or the other team intercepts the ball, you take the penalty and pretend like the failed play didn't even happen.

So you can actually increase the length of the game by moving quickly in-between plays...

Just replace them after every series[1], that way while the offense is coming off the field they are getting their helmets swapped out and the defense is going in with fresh helmets, rinse/repeat.

[1] A series being after the offenses/defenses swap out, this could be as little as one play, but rarely more than 15-18 and I would guess on average about 8 or 9.

Edit: grammar

These players have to start somewhere. A highschool can't eat the cost of multiple helmet replacements.

Agreed, but the hits my nine year old is making playing pee wee league are significantly different than those happening in college, the CFL, and NFL. In the same way that a pro skier in the backcountry uses very different safety equipment than the person on in-bounds groomed snow. This isn't to say that we shouldn't seek to keep kids as safe as possible, just that I don't see an issue in scaling the equipment (and its costs) relative to the risk.

Anecdotal, but from what I've heard it tends to be that at the high school and earlier levels hitting is done in a more chaotic manner. Yes, they're not 300-plus pound athletes hitting people, but seems that even in the earlier stages it is detrimental.

It's also cumulative so someone doing 4 years in HS then stopping is inherently safer than someone that goes to collage and even that's safer than a 5+ year NFL run.

Granted far more people play at lower levels but it's reasonable to consider cost benefits for each group. With the option to increase protection for people expected to continue to the next level.

The average NFL career is 3.3 years, so a HS football stint would actually be longer.

The average is dragged down by people that stop very quickly. People that stay for 5+ years are at much higher risks than someone that stops at 1. And again that's after 3-4 years in collage and 2-4 years in high-school.

So we are talking ~9 years vs up to 26+ when every year is more risky than the last because of cumulative damage.

It adds an incentive for the defense to intentionally crumple an offensive player's helmet with the intention of taking them out for a play or slowing down their rhythm. It would likely have a net-negative impact on safety.

You could argue that boxing gloves make boxing more dangerous. Gloves protect the boxer's hands, not their opponents as is widely believed. As per the Wikipedia article below, punches to the head were less common in the bare-knuckle boxing days for fear of boxers injuring their hands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_glove#Safety

It was also a much much bloodier sport, for what its worth.

One knockout punch, or 40 smaller ones?

CTE gets you, either way.

as an increasingly reluctant football fan, this has always been my take on it as well. though the short-term effects of such a change might be kind of wonky, if you remove the super heavy padding the problem of hitting people with impunity because they think they're immune should solve itself in the long run.

You could do layered helmets - an inner helmet similar to what they wear today, and a crumpling cycling-style foam block helmet that slips over it. Have a team of runners hand out fresh foam block helmets every play and collect the chunks from the field.

This is the viewpoint the NFL obviously won't address.

They enjoy the game being turned into a hyper-violent gladiator sport.

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