definitely rip. basecoaches not wearing a helmet always seemed awfully dumb. almost as dumb as the guy who didn't wanna wear the martian helmets. athletes are so dumb.

I wonder how older generations will react when they see NFL personalities get saddled with dementia.

I'm waiting. Jim Brown must be the luckiest guy alive.

Plus, you cannot directly attribute death to football alone. Let alone concussions alone. Let alone repeated helmet to helmet contact making someone die at age 58 when there are infinite factors. A lot of former NFL players have other issues. #1 weight issues that puts them at risk imo.

Average normal life expectancy: 76
Average NFL life expectancy : 58

yeah nothing to do with football

tuma, 279 weakens your argument; do not stoop to that. Correlation isn't causation — you're vulnerable to people pointing out that there are serious selection biases (big people play football, for one thing, plus the racial component) and plenty of other possible causes (PEDs, unhealthy lifestyle associated with the sport, other sorts of injuries, and so on).

But you've already given the real argument: (1) concussions are unavoidable in football, at a rate much higher than in most other sports, even in youth football and certainly later; (2) even when there is no concussion, we are gathering clear evidence that deceleration trauma happens frequently, even when there isn't even any direct contact with the head (very much in contravention of most people's intuition), again at a rate much greater than in other sports; (3) the inevitable concussions and non-concussion brain trauma are absolutely known to cause serious damage, up to and including death, in later life. That's clear, and unarguable by a sensible person; that people are arguing nonetheless is evidence that they will not be convinced.

Of course, danger isn't enough to demonstrate that kids should be prohibited from playing football as it currently exists; for that you need to assess the benefits and then weigh them against the risks. The principle argument being made by the pro-football crowd on the benefits side is that football provides unique benefits, benefits that other, less dangerous sports cannot provide. That one's hard to argue with because it's subjective, even though most of us see its weaknesses.

Then there's what in effect is an argument that because it's always been done this way, it's OK or at least worth it — because football is popular, it should continue to be played. I don't think anyone really falls for that one, but several people have advanced it. I don't know how best to go up against that beyond pointing out that it's completely illogical.

I can't see football fading out just because its so big and its not like pro basketball or something is good for a persons body. I also think, y'know there are reasons beyond head injuries that NFL guys have shorter life spans, I don't think anyone believes going out there and smashing bodies with 11 freaks of nature over a thousand times a year is good for a person. As medicine and our knowledge of it gets better I think we'll move in a direction where people are safer about it, people play with concussions less now at least than in the 70s or 80s obviously. I don't know, but I just can't believe helmets as they're designed now are close to optimal, like theres gotta be a way to provide the same protection and make them softer, I'd be shocked if there isn't.

As for me, Ive been concussed once had my bell rung twice. Actually played hockey till I was 19 at the Junior level as a goalie and was never concussed and then in the past year and a half or so all my head injuries came playing football with my friends. One I just was coming back to an under thrown ball and went down for it and caught a knee in the head. Didn't lose consciousness but was pretty dizzy for a minute then had disrupted vision for like an hour and was just kinda off for about a week. The other two just bumping my head on the dirt falling backwards catching jump balls, they were both within a couple days of each other and for a few days maybe some light sensitivity but a doctor shined a light in my eye and told me I wasn't concussed so who knows.

I read somewhere that it'd be totally possible to create bulkier padding, which would reduce the force of collisions, but it'd slow the players down and be bad for the game.

I've never worn a real helmet. What does the padding feel like?

edit: Dielman gave his retirement speech today, was real sad. Rivers broke down too, and I hate Rivers, but had to feel for the guy. Career cut short because winning was more important than his brain function.

Padding and a helmet is something to get used to. It is heavy and it hurts to put on initially. At least in illinois the regulations for high school state that you have to have three days of helmet only practice before you can go to full pads practices. I remember freshman year, my first year playing, it was hard to get used to in the summer. It's so much hotter with pads on.

Tumaterminator, didn't you say it was pretty much physics that caused these problems. There is nothing you can do about the brain hitting the sides of the skull.

im just talking about blows to the head. the less the resistance is in a collision the weaker the impact is.that's why airbags work. if they could develop some sci-fi gelatin-like substance between the outter shell of the helmet and the brain, it would absorb the impact and provide a better cushion...i just don't really know what the current helmets are like. Is it even inflatable on the inside, or is it just raw padding?

there's a direct relatiionship between mass of the helmet and ability to absorb hits, but an inverse relationship in safety as it pertains to delivering safe blows.

i wish a physics guy would chime in. but i know enough to laugh when pundits speak of developing a better helmet.

It will be really interesting to see how much this (guys being bigger faster and hitting harder (???? football expert should chime in on the style of play today versus the past) is negated by the better concussion protocol in current guys...it just seems like the average nfl player probably has 5 concussions over the course of his life no matter what, and if they were just concussions without getting banged up 1000 times in between them, it prob wouldn't be anywhere near as devastating.

also - please retire jahvid best.

Every team in my league has inflatable helmets. I don't know how common they are overall, but I would imagine that they are the standard by this point.

Helmet I played with was only about an inch and a half of styrofoam.

Actually, there's already a sort of what you might call sci-fi gelatin inside many of them. And regardless whether it's gel, air, foam, or whatever, without making the helmet substantially larger, there's not going to be a lot you can do to reduce the deceleration because it already takes place over a significant portion of the available displacement.

And it would do little to ameliorate the non-impact issues.

I'm sure there is a reason it never caught on, but I always thought the Mark Kelso helmet was a good idea.

I can believe the interior padding is generally pretty good. But isn't there a way to get the shell softer so that when theres some kind of helmet to helmet contact it isn't as much force? I have no idea, just asking

softer outter shell = more force absorbed by the human head

Seriously, the physics of this are pretty easy. Trauma to the brain results from deceleration (specifically, the deceleration of the skull, while the brain is still moving), and you can't reduce the trauma without reducing the deceleration.

Given an initial and a final velocity (and these are fixed for our purposes), you minimize decelaration when it takes place over the maximum possible distance, and when the deceleration is constant over that distance. The latter aspect is what you're trying to fix by monkeying with the kind of padding (inside or out — it's irrelevant for this purpose), but in the end you're limited by the distance over which the deceleration occurs. If you're hitting a solid, immovable object, or helmet on helmet so it's symmetrical, the minimum possible deceleration is given by

a_min = V²/2d

(Note: if the object you're hitting has some give to it then the formula changes by a certain factor, but the relationship between acceleration and distance doesn't.)

Now, if the padding isn't providing uniform acceleration (deceleration), then that's the first place you look. But after you've fixed that, you simply cannot do better unless you make the helmet bigger, thereby providing more distance over which the skull can decelerate. As you can see from the formula, to halve the deceleration you double the distance, and so forth.

Whether within that distance you achieve the (preferably uniform) deceleration by compression of the outside or the inside of the helmet is irrelevant, as long as it happens somewhere between the object you hit and the skull. (It may be relevant to whether the helmet causes injury to other players, but we're not talking about that.) The Kelso helmet wasn't safer for him because the padding was on the outside, but because it made the helmet bigger (through adding padding, not hard stuff — more stuff to compress). The only reason they put it on the outside was that that was easier.

(Note: I'm sure someone can find an article saying otherwise and I know at the time Kelso was wearing that, a lot of commentators said incorrect things about it, but let's just say that your average sports journalist doesn't understand physics.)

And none of this has any effect on the trauma that's caused by not-collision deceleration (though making the helmet heavier would help in that regard [while obviously having other consequences, some of them bad]).

See above. No to both of these.

It's like your car has a hard bumper, but crumple zones. What saves you in a crash is the extent to which the car compresses, and whether it's in the bumper, in front of the engine block, or between the block and the firewall doesn't matter.

However, the extent to which you injure a pedestrian you hit can depend heavily on the hardness of the bumper — not because the physics are fundamentally different but because the pedestrian is softer than the car, so that hitting a pedestrian doesn't compress the crumple zones of the car, but the way so-called "energy-absorbing" bumpers are designed, sometimes they compress a little when hitting a ped. That's a tradeoff that actually makes the driver slightly less safe (versus a car that compressed equally in the bumper and the body crumple zones) but pedestrians much safer (and also reduces body damage, which makes insurance companies happy).

Similarly, a soft outer shell on the helmet will not protect the brain of the player wearing it any better than a hard shell and more padding inside would, but in practice it may reduce injury to other players, say from helmet-on-knee impacts.

I wasn't saying the distance covered would be any less with a softer shell, was thinking all else was equal. I may still be wrong. I am officially retiring as a pop-physicist.

Idk if this a ******ed idea or not. But, since this problem as of right now cannot be solved without increasing the size of helmet. How about some kind of magnetic helmet that repels without contact.. or at least slows down the helmet to helmet contact?

Again, it doesn't matter how it decelerates, just how much distance it does it over, but increasing the distance is good. So in theory if your started the deceleration before contact even occurred, then yes, that could help.

Obviously that's not going to be practical terribly soon, but it's a cute idea — I was all set to explain why it couldn't work, but it actually could.

people might break their necks more, but it sounds sweet to me.

All else equal the brain doesn't give a damn whether the outer shell compresses or the inner padding does. It's just how long it has before it catches up to the skull as it sloshes around inside it,¹ and that's just a function of distance (assuming constant deceleration, which is tough to achieve).

Soft-shelled helmets are probably still a good idea to protect against other sorts of injuries, as I observed above. If you don't think it would help for helmet-on-knee, consider hand on helmet — the Bears might have had Jay Cutler all season if all helmets had exterior padding.


¹ Not really, but close enough. I believe damage is done both from the impact of the skull against the brain case and by tearing at the back of the brain case, plus possibly some rebound, but now we're getting beyond my expertise. And because in any case it's a function of the magnitude of acceleration, the physics above holds.

Some players use the helmet as a weapon.

It's partly due to the violence of the game and partly due to many players are extremely obese. Are there separate stats for QBs and WRs?

I've also always wondered if the argument that putting a fat person through football is better for their bodies than not. It seems like buildling all that muscle and pushing the body hard would be rough on the heart.

So, if everyone had soft outer shells wouldn't it be less of an issue to go helmet to helmet with someone because their helmet wouldn't be hitting yours with a hard shell? Or am I missing something.