NFL Preparing to Embed Processors and Accelerometers in Player Helmets
insidehpc.com
insidehpc.com
It's odd, too, because I do enjoy other sporting events that can have long lasting injury problems, and I really like mixed martial arts. I don't know why exactly football makes me feel skeevy these days and the other sports don't, but there it is. It may be that I can fathom living a full and complete life with, say, blown out knees, but can't even comprehend what it's like to experience Alzheimer's.
I also worry (with some incidental evidence) that improvements in helmet tech have actually amplified the problem. If my head is "safely" encased in space age materials, I'm much more likely to use it to whack on people. I suspect linemen and "dirty" defensive players would play a totally different game if the risk to their face and head was more obvious.
An interesting link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/sports/football/30dementia...
I remember reading somewhere- can't remember where, maybe the Dr. Z book- that the rate of concussions has gone up as helmets have improved. The concussion rate was pretty low back in the days of the leather caps (of course, guys got their faces smashed in on a pretty regular basis). The rate started going up as soon as they attached face masks to helmets and has continued to go up as the face masks have gotten larger. The same goes for pads. As the equipment improves, players increasingly use it as a weapon.
The issue of concussions won't be solved by technology. It will be solved by officiating. FIFA figured out how to manage player safety decades ago...send off players who endanger opponents and make their team play with ten.
Using officiating rather than technology as the means of protecting players translates to all levels of the game...and therefore, becomes accepted by fans and players over the course of a few years.
I like the idea behind sending a player off or even suspending them from the next game if they start behaving dangerously. The NFL's current crackdown on dangerous hits is only sending a lot of extra money to charity (where all fines go) and not really modifying player behavior.
But to put it in perspective, it is extremely rare for a player to be ejected under the current rules which allow replacement. The penalties typically associated with dangerous play are purely tactical - 15 yards or less (1/2 the distance to the goal line).
That said, though, I'm still not convinced that forcing a team to play with a 10-man team is even workable given the rules of American football, or even desirable.
For instance, would you propose that both offense and defense play with one fewer man for the rest of the game in a "send-off" scenario? What about special teams? If you used a "power-play" rule like ice hockey does, how does clock management (a huge part of American football strategy) interact with that rule?
Even if you could iron all this out, there's still the fact (which you acknowledged above) that a team playing with 10 players is extremely likely to lose to a team playing with 11. Couple this with the fact that referees are far from infallible (and are currently not held accountable for bad calls in any serious or transparent way), and you've got a case where one bad call early on could literally cost a team a game. To the best of my knowledge, personal fouls aren't contestable, and you can't appeal for a game to be replayed. This would be a huge problem even if you could iron out all the other problems with forcing a team to play undermanned. That's why I don't support that plan. Ejecting a player is fine, but not allowing substitutions is overboard given the nature of American football.
In lieu of sending off without replacement, allow the opponent to select any player on the field to be ejected or to defer their selection until later in the game. In other words, a team on offense could defer the selection of the player to be ejected until their opponent's best quarterback entered the field.
I also wouldn't be surprised if teams responded to this by rewriting their contracts to clarify what happens to the salary a player would earn for a given game when they are ejected. Those two factors are likely to be control enough.
My concern with it is more that we'd end up with the same silliness that soccer gets where someone is barely touched and falls over looking to draw a foul.
These are high velocity impacts to the head, generally caused by the nature of the game. The equipment needs to evolve to help these players minimize the damage to their bodies.
Officiating can change the nature of the game uniformly at all levels. PeeWees aren't going to get the technology...nor team doctors and access to independent neurologists for that matter.
We need data to understand what these impacts are doing to our bodies, and then we need to design technology to minimize the risks. That or we should just stop playing football--not something I'd be very excited to see happen.
Maybe someone should instrument the players so we can collect data and analyze the various situations that prove problematic, then extrapolate back from there to rule changes. Too bad the NFL isn't looking into that, since they have significantly more resources than any other level of football play.
...wait
Many players have terribly bad habits such as lowering their head and hitting with the top of their helmet when tackling and other equally bad ideas that might not cause your to pass now but overtime adds up.
Youth players imitate what they see on TV and importantly what the announcers praise...like knocking the quarterback out of the game.
Those smaller hits start at what age...seven or eight? Have you ever tried to teach proper technique to an eight year old?
The audio demonstrates why technology is not the issue.
It's sad actually, skills players in football have always been the ones talked about and focused on, and here we have, yet again, the linemen mostly forgotten about.
Another point mentioned here is that the improvements in helmet design have undoubtedly led to more violent use of the helmet. I have a friend in the NFL league office, and they're well aware of this ironic (?) fact, but what is there to do? Go back to leather caps without face masks?
The technology mentioned here could actually provide the players with real-time data and threshold points ("you've had 264 high-intensity hits this season; danger zone") which could perhaps help to adjust player habits more readily. I'm thinking about a parallel situation where certain residents used less water (or some other utility) than their neighbors when the meter was visible for routine/daily check-ins.
Disclosure: I played a year of college football as a quasi-lineman (tight end) before the drudgery of football practice led me to quit and move over to [JV] basketball.
It would be pretty cool to also see the changes in the brains of players over their career. It might be hard to shove a bunch of football players into a MRI machine but the info that could be gathered from that would be very interesting I think.
This work also has application to other things like head trauma from car accidents as an example.
I like the sensor approach, but using three referees as intermediaries to nanny 22 grown men is silly. Attach the accelerometers to taser like devices attached to the player and we are getting somewhere. Instant feedback pain in response to previously unsensed damage. Evolution would probably get around to it sooner or later anyway.