Is It Time to Retire the Football Helmet? | Hacker News Reader

Is It Time to Retire the Football Helmet?

online.wsj.com

42 pointsedw51965 comments

'there may be a greater prevalence of head injuries in the American game because the players hit each other with forces up to 100% greater. "If they didn't have helmets on, they wouldn't do that,"'

The second part of that is dead wrong. When millions of dollars and hall of fame spots are on the line, people will sacrifice their bodies. Boxers and MMA fighters knowingly take up a sport where their retired legendary heroes can barely form a coherent sentence after age 50. They know going in they're going to get their brain damaged and they do it anyway, and boxing's not half as prestigious as football here.

Football is America's premier sport, and the Super Bowl is America's most prestigious sporting event. People will collide just as hard without helmets as they do with in order to win a Lombardi trophy regardless of the cost to themselves.

It's silly to think that if millions of young Americans will put their life on the line to defend our country, that hundreds won't put their life on the line to achieve fame and fortune.

I think you're assuming a lot here. Many countries around the world play rugby, from which American Football is derived. The only use of helmets in that sport is for covering players' ears if they stick out and are vulnerable to getting torn. It's just as aggressive as AF, but (preferably) played at something closer to the speed of soccer, without all the committee meetings and personnel changes (which everyone outside the US finds mystifying and dull). Obviously the players are not as big or colliding with such force as a result, but the game isn't any less popular for that; and happily, it's not highly correlated with brain damage (unless you count rugby fans' notorious appetite for beer). In short, you can have sporting machismo for fun and profit without necessarily needing all the players to look like the Hulk.

Football is America's premier sport, and the Super Bowl is America's most prestigious sporting event.

The super bowl is certainly a big deal because it all comes down to one match, but I think it might be interesting to aggregate the interest and profits in the World Series of baseball (best of seven games between the top two teams), rather than compare a single baseball game with a single football game. Baseball is arguably a more successful export than American football, and has greater long-term growth potential. Although NFL is about 2x more profitable, and attracts bigger crowds, there are 10 times more baseball games than football games per season, so overall attendance at baseball stadia is actually 5x higher than at football stadia (http://www.plunkettresearch.com/Industries/Sports/SportsStat...).

Boxers and MMA fighters knowingly take up a sport where their retired legendary heroes can barely form a coherent sentence after age 50. They know going in they're going to get their brain damaged and they do it anyway, and boxing's not half as prestigious as football here.

But boxing used to be hugely popular; our greater understanding of the long-term damage which results, and exactly how it results, are IMHO a significant reason for the decline in popularity. When I was a kid Muhammad Ali was a megastar; he may not have made as much money in $ terms as someone like Tiger Woods today, but he was arguably the first globally famous sporting figure. The heavyweight boxing championship was considered a must-see event, like the premier Olympic events or a world cup final. Now, not so much. MMA or ultimate fighting or whatever it's called is well marketed and profitable, but it doesn't have anything like the prestige that boxing used to do. If you stopped 10 people on the street I doubt that more than 1 could tell you who the MMA champion is, whereas anyone over 35 could name some former heavyweight boxing champs.

I'd bet $100 that American football will go the same way over the next 40 years. Not because the NFL or even a single NFL team will decide to adopt a more delicate style of play, but because parents are not going to be enthused about the risk of their kids getting brain damage in high school or college while they're aiming for the NFL. Once a player goes pro, football pays so much that they'll probably be able to cover their future medical expenses. But brain injury to a non-pro player has the potential to be just as expensive, and if the injured player never gets near the pro salary then the cost lands back on their family or possibly the taxpayer.

Lately the NFL has been marketing itself heavily to women because they consider the male sports audience to be saturated at this point. I think greater female interest in the sport will boost it in the short term, but as more of these fans become parents there will be a correspondingly greater brake on new entrants to the sport. Personally, I think NFL has already peaked, and can only go downhill from here.

Basketball is probably the best export. Baseball is semi-popular, but it has to deal with cricket, which is similar enough but not quite. I'm a huge fan of baseball and its history (Babe Ruth is nickname for an American back then!) but they took it out of the Olympics though maybe World Baseball Classic can make it worthwhile.

I'm dubious about your assertion. Yes, players would be willing to put their life on the line, but the way fame and fortune are achieved in football is winning the game, and a team whose best players have sacrificed themselves isn't going to win many games. The football field tactics would necessarily change to protect the most valuable assets, the players.

Just like how individual baseball pitchers would be willing to put their life on the line by overworking themselves, but a good coach is smart enough to pull them out as needed to avoid injury.

Just curious -- how do you explain away the many fewer head injuries in the australian football leagues?

Aussie rules football is a completely different game.

American football builds in a guaranteed 6+ head contacts per play, from linemen colliding with each other when the ball gets snapped each down. In Aussie rules, players distribute across the field, and the game isn't built around downs.

And in American football, when you tackle someone, the play is over. Aussie rules is much more fluid, and every time you tackle someone, you simultaneously risk taking yourself out of the play. In that regard, it's much more similar to hockey, where laying out a hard check might cost you a goal because it means you're sprawled out on the ice rather than getting back on defense.

Edit: also, a bunch of the worst hits in American football come thanks to the forward pass - a QB leads a crossing route too much, and the defenseless receiver gets jacked stretching out for the ball. There are no thrown passes in Aussie rules football.

Indeed. Aussie rules is probably the least tackle-intensive of the non-round-football games.

A better comparison would be to Rugby League, which is tackle-stops-play much like Grid Iron (which is what we call American Football). But there's still less tackling, because you're only allowed to tackle the guy with the ball, whereas Grid Iron seems to be an everybody-tackles-everybody-all-the-time sort of situation.

Quite. In American football the basic play is to prevent the entire team from following the ball around.

In rugby the only time you have this pushing behavior is in a scrum (aka scrimmage), where most of the team members get into a group blocking position against the other team and the referee throws the ball into the middle between their legs. Then the teams try to push each other backwards so one of them can get over the ball and kick it out to the rear of their scrum, where another player can pick it up and start running. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/rugby_union/rules_and_equipm... has an explanation and a useful picture)

Even though this scrum is a test of brute strength, there's no impact involved because the scrum is carefully arranged and supervised by the referee before the ball is thrown in, not least to minimize the risk of injury. Pushing is one tactic, especially beloved of teams like the New Zealand All-Blacks who have a lot of big Polynesian players, but an equally valid approach is to rotate the scrum to one side or the other and use an opposing team's forward momentum against them. The main injury risk is a broken neck or torn ear, but these are mercifully rare. About 10% of rugby injuries involve concussions, but the overall rate of injury is much lower, and you could play many games without ever getting a bang on the head.

Strength is important, but no more so than speed or agility. I weigh only 140 pounds but I was a fairly good rugby player in school because I was nimble, and there are quite a few small professional players. If you are interested and have 4 minutes to spare, this video shows the highlights of a game with two excellent, versatile teams doing 'a bit of everything': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heoO_5MvZ0w&feature=relat...

True. The rate of head injuries in either variant of Rugby might be a better comparison.

Quite apart from the frequency of contact, another difference between American Football and other contact sports is the greater emphasis on physical speed and power of players over stamina, positional awareness etc.

As someone who once completed a rugby tackle by intentionally headbutting a moving opponent's ankle (in a local third team game...) I can assure you that lack of helmet doesn't solve the problem of overly aggressive sportsmen on an adrenalin rush...

Gotcha, I wasn't aware the game was so significantly different.

I think the WSJ article suggests that removing the helmets would force the game to change in this manner.

Also very much agreed regarding the linemen situation. It does conflict a little with your edit, however -- while the worst hits come from the forward pass (frequently), I think the most brain damage (at least from reading the Malcolm Gladwell article on the topic) comes from subconcussive impacts. Basically every time a player runs into each other, 50-80 times per practice or game.

I think the NFL is at the cusp of realizing how much damage the players' brains suffer. They (and even the NFLPA) aren't very good about taking care of players after their careers are over. I see two possible solutions: improve the equipment, or significantly change the game.

I don't know footie rules well enough to explain it, but the quote I cited said collisions in the NFL are 100% more forceful. I assume that's based on how the game is structured.

I certainly believe that. However, I suspect the game would significantly change if helmets were removed (hypothetically).

It would be interesting if I had a time machine, so I could go back and measure the impact of collision in the NFL game circa 1930. I think that's all the article suggests -- change the game significantly, or else start to realize that just about every NFL career player has serious brain damage, regardless of whether they suffered a concussion.

With the current rules in AFL, there's practically no legal head high contact. Tackling with your arm around the shoulder (or higher) of the opponent isn't legal. It's no longer legal to make contact with the head of the player if that player has his head over the ball while it's loose (ie. hip and shoulder from the front or side).

Isn't it that when you hit your head without a helmet, it's going to hurt much more and thus you avoid getting hit (at least that's the argument used here)? As far as I understood, the problem with the helmets is the hits you don't feel as painfully with the helmet as you would feel without, but which are very dangerous if they occur very frequently.

I don't know if you can compare that to MMA or boxing the way you do, but I'm not a professional football player either.

As mattmaroon just said, American football players will sacrifice themselves (i.e. tolerate the pain) for the game.

I think the argument is that, by and large, Australian football is no less violent than American football. However, helmets incentivise poor tackling technique (i.e. leading with the helmet). If you took off the facemask, the game would be just as quick/painful etc. but you wouldn't see defensive ends driving quarterbacks into the ground with their helmets... instead, they'd be wrapping up and tackling the way they did back in the day, before the "human bowling ball" approach became popular.

EDIT: by the way, kids in peewee football are taught from day 1 to tackle with the head up. The "big hits" you see on ESPN are fundamentally poor tackles... they just seem to get the "oohs and ahss" because they look cool to people who don't understand football.

Maybe this is why this quarterback tackle from last weekend was such a "big hit" -- QBs never practice tackling. It's the old thing about the most dangerous opponent for a swordsman, apart from a master, is one who is completely untrained.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5STc2_bM7k

I've heard the same thing is true of boxing vs. MMA fights; because boxers wear heavily padded gloves, they end up throwing and receiving many (less powerful) blows in a fight because it doesn't hurt your hand to hit someone in those gloves. But MMA fighters wear minimal hand protection, which results in fewer (more powerful) blows. Surprisingly, it turns out that this may be healthier in the long run.

This also reminds me of the whole "modern running shoe" vs. barefoot approach. Interesting what our bodies are optimized for.

".. boxers wear heavily padded gloves, they end up throwing and receiving many (less powerful) blows in a fight because it doesn't hurt your hand to hit someone in those gloves."

No. While it is true that their hands are injured less, the gloves allow them to deliver _more_ _powerful_ blows. The use of gloves brought brain injury to boxing in a big way.

In the days preceding use of gloves, knockouts and concussions were less frequent, fights lasted much longer and required considerable endurance as well as fighting skill.

The padding of gloves in itself does not make blows to the head harder, it makes them less painful for the competitor delivering them, and that leads to harder blows. Hit someone hard on the head with a bare fist, and chances are that you break your hand. Because of that, before gloves came into use, boxers would go for body blows, rather than blows to the head.

Bare-knuckle boxing is also a far bloodier affair than Marquess of Queensberry rules, even though it is much safer when it comes to brain injuries. I can imagine mainstream contemporary crowds being too squeamish to watch a real bare-knuckle match.

I think there are a lot or reasons that MMA is probably safer. These include

- Flash KO's, leading to fast stoppages in MMA as opposed to standing counts in Boxing

- Less emphasis on head strikes and more emphasis on wrestling/control/submissions in MMA. Even cuts can stop the fight.

- Less rounds in MMA

- Different culture. More 'college boy' wrestling than 'street kid' boxing.

If you had boxing rules with MMA gloves you'd probably have more cuts but still a lot of brain damage.

They didn't have any gloves in the earliest incarnations of MMA, and fighters would almost never hit each other in the head. The thin MMA gloves they have now do very little to protect the recipient of a blow, but a great deal to protect the knuckles of the striker from the effects of punching someone in the head. The crowds want to see a little bit of that blood.

mma gloves are there to protect the puncher's knuckles and not the punchee's face

The real killer is sparring, you don't go as hard but you do it a lot more than you fight. MMA fighters usually spar with boxing gloves, but since striking is only one part of MMA they can't afford to spend as much time training it as boxers.

All your repliers seem to disagree, but I believe you're right. When I started doing MMA I read a number of academic papers, which I believe are the source of what you're saying above. (Sadly I don't have citations, it was years ago).

This is what rugby players have been teasing football players about forever.

And really, the only way to make it work is if they also get rid of most of the padding. Because even with a rugby form tackle , if you smack into a full padded up football player, that's going to cause some trauma.

I like the idea of taking it to the other extreme, attach the helmet to the shoulder and back padding so you can swivel the helmet but not change it's angle relative to the body. Then add even more padding and focus the sport on armored tanks flailing at each other. You would still have the issue of people flying end over end and landing on their heads so replace the playing surface with gymnastic mats. Of course we could still get some joint injury’s so add a protective exoskeleton to prevent over extension etc and then watch as people fling their body’s around and bounce off of each other.

It might not be a sport at that point, but it would be an interesting spectacle.

...and require a player to actually go through the uprights with the ball for field goals by way of strategically placed trampolines?

I like it, still if your going that far why not have them play inside a giant pinball machine?

I played rugby all through school in Scotland. Starting at eight years old they had us spend months on tackling drills, and a lot of it was how not to hurt yourself in making a tackle. I wince just about every time I see an American football hit now I live in the U.S., just from the risk the tackler is taking with their body.

However there are other significant differences between (union) rugby and American football which make removing protection dubious. There is no blocking in rugby so only the ball carrier faces being hit and is almost always aware the hit is coming. Also a man on the ground must release hold of the ball so there is no need to go all out to force a fumble.

The other huge difference is that tackles in rugby are mostly from behind with both players moving, meaning there is less in the way of an actual collision. American football has a lot more tackles involving two players running into each other head on or the tackling player running into a stationary player.

The other huge difference is that tackles in rugby are mostly from behind with both players moving

That's simply not true. When you're taught to tackle, it's always from the point of view of someone running in to you. In fact, I remember "classic"-style tackling from behind being actively discouraged, as no-one wants a mouth full of fast-kicking studs.

I can't believe that's true; tackles from behind can only really occur when a player has broken the game line, which happens far less often than a player running into defenders on the game line.

My take on this: The human body was made to run without add-ons. Pads and helmets seem like a great idea at first but they cause NFL players run out of memory after they retire. Let's re-install the Football OS clean of all plugins and call it Rugby ;-)

Removing pads you'd still have nothing that looked at all like Rugby.

Of course, rugby players also get a lot of brain injuries.

I knew one kid at school (well okay, I knew of one kid at another school) who had his neck broken in a scrum. (That ended the "compulsory Rugby" policy at that particular school.)

Yes, someone at my school broke his neck in a scrum as well. And I've heard plenty of similar stories over the news. On a rugby field, the most dangerous place is in the scrum.

Here is Gladwell on Football safety:

Offensive Play

How different are dogfighting and football?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_...

great read, joel. thanks for sharing. just about no one knows how to tell how a story better than gladwell (sidenote: seems like he'd make for a great pitch-man)

the NFL is reacting with their gut right now. i know they're trying to send a message, but the officials are going to receive the brunt of the criticism when there's so much ambiguity between the rules right now.

this is an issue that needs to be addressed after the season...maybe that gives a YC-startup time to put together a new helmet ;)

You could change the NFL a great deal by changing the substitution rules, and making players play both ways as they commonly did before about 1960. You'd probably see the linemen come down to about linebacker size, and the skill positions to about defensive back size.

Meanwhile I'm waiting for the obsessive parents of America to read up on the cumulative effects of heading soccer balls.

I highly doubt that big-time football will ever change while it is still making so much $. Yuppie American parents _are_ paying attention to the risks of head injuries and they are voting with their kids feet by putting their kids into lacrosse and soccer. Football won't change until it starts losing irrecoverable ground to lacrosse and soccer.

So we'll see growing class differentiation in sport choices between those who grew up with rich parents (better protect young Tyler's brain so he can grow up to be a lawyer) and those who grew up with poor parents (I'll bet young LeMonjello could be an NFL star someday!)?

I think we already see that. This certainly was the case with boxing.

The problem, it seems to me, is the temporal separation between the impact injury and the symptoms, breaking any feedback loop.

What we need is a redesigned football helmet that has razor-sharp metal spikes, pointed both in and out, causing immediate excruciating pain to both parties in any impact.

That will stop concussions, guaranteed.

As a reluctant and occasional watcher of AFL (QLD'er) I can say that the comparison to AFL has no value. The rules of AFL impose many constraints on the tackler and the pay-off amounts to less than the turnover of possession in soccer. The best comparison to US football would be Rugby League which favours more 'hard hits' than the more internationally renowned Rugby Union. I've yet to see studies compare the results but my impression is that the League player suffer significantly less brain injuries during their professional careers.

I think the last paragraph really sums up why this drastic of a change is not going to happen:

"Without the helmet, they wouldn't hit their head in stupid plays," says P. David Halstead, technical director for the Nocsae, the group that sets helmet-safety standards. But without helmets, the game "wouldn't be football," he says.

There may be a sport similar to American football without helmets right now that becomes very popular in coming years. However I don't see such a drastic change ever being applied to American football directly.

The solution is simple - sports should ban ALL hits to the head. Zero tolerance, it is uncalled for and brings nothing to the game

Would this really solve anything? It would reduce the rate of serious hits (and thus concussions). But by what amount? Any time you have men this size, who are this motivated, moving this quickly, you'll have serious injuries.

Not to mention the fact that the elephant in the NFLPA's room is that its starting to look like subconcussive impacts are a major part of the problem. The big hits and helmet-to-helmet draw the attention, sure, but the 60 hits per practice are what drive much of the damage.

You are trying to remove the initiation of contact to the head. This does a couple things 1.) Simplifies and remove ambiguity from any call. 2.) Reduce the initial impact to the head.

Is it going to eliminate all head injures no, but is a clear way to define a rule.

Most Australians don't get the point of all the helmets and padding in the american game. AFL has strong rules for protecting the head, to the point that players attempt to exploit this and ducking their head when they have nowhere to go hoping the tackling player will make contact with them and draw a free kick.

Unfortunately these people have been playing with pads since they were kids, this isn't a change that could be introduced easily. I do think it is more or less the way things need to go though, but I don't actually see it happening.

If the NFL ever did get rid of helmets, then I'm starting a new league with helmets.

They might as well just start the NFL as flag-football.

http://crimeletes.com/?watch=desean-jackson-gets-jacked-up

There's no way on earth that tackle would have been tried sans helmet.

The logic "remove helmets and players won't make hard hits" is like saying "remove seatbelts from cars and people will drive safer."

A very poor analogy. You never deliberately initiate a collision in a car. Also being surrounded by a car body gives you a false sense of invulnerability.

Sure, few people deliberately initiate a collision. However, that false sense of invulnerability you mention may induce behaviors that increase the likelihood of initiating a collision.

I read once that the studies show that as cars got safer with better brakes, tires, seatbelts, airbags, etc. people increased their speed or took more risks to compensate so the overall risk stayed roughly the same.

That may not be far from the truth. It may be akin to the counter-intuitive removal of signs and signals from roads to increase safety:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html

I think that the primary logic of the article is that helmets were designed to prevent skull fractures but an unintended outcome is an increase in concussions.

Actually, there is a body of research attesting to your logic:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2006/11/peltzman_on_reg.htm...

I believe some studies have shown that removing traffic control devices can actually reduce accident rates by forcing drivers to be more aware of traffic around them and make accommodations.

In theory you're right, but probably not so in practice. Football players would see the consequences of the change much more quickly - they'd go from being able to dive at a player head first and have a cushioned impact to having their skull connect with something hard and feeling a lot of pain. I'd expect their behaviour would adapt in response to that. Similarly car drivers probably wouldn't drive any more safely until they experienced the consequences of crashing while not wearing a seat belt.

Make cars out of glass and put spikes on the dash and you'd see different results.

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