After Tua Tagovailoa’s terrifying concussion on Thursday Night Football, the NFL took small steps to stop another avid player from bypassing concussion protocol. Tagovailoa’s hands and arms are trapped in fence reaction is one of those indelible images since Lawrence Taylor grabbed Joe Theismann’s leg on Monday Night Football.
The NFL is getting soft. You hear it all the time from fans longing for the savage days of “Plug up. But that didn’t apply to their hard shell helmets. Tagovailoa’s injury should only hasten the NFL’s transition to Helmet Making headgear in the game is mandatory.
This season, NFL Authorized Guardian Hat Worn by all formations in attack, defense, tight finish, defender and tight finish from the start of training camp and the second pre-season game. And despite concerns that players would be more willing to use helmets to compete in the real world, The average number of tremors among those location groups decreased from 23 over the preceding three-year period was 11 in 2022. Of those 11 concussions, six stemmed from a blow to the mask, clearly lacking an additional layer of protection.
Between that information and the NFL’s focus on concussion mitigation, the next step is clear. Helmets should also be used as headgear for live matches. There will be resistance. How many have we seen? combat players have brought up to avoid making small changes to the helmet design. Three years ago, several players threw fit models of their favorite helmets that were discontinued. Helmets will be the most dramatic change since professional football replaced leather helmets with relatively rudimentary helmets with face masks in the 1950s.
From a commercial and aesthetic perspective, helmets are offensive. The helmet’s soft outer shell is made of closed-cell polyurethane foam, which will make NFL players’ heads look less like the bobbleheads they’ve been like for half a century or more. Toad Mushroom. Regular-sized helmets and mini-helmets with tournament logos printed on them are hugely popular memorabilia among autographers. Would the NFL be willing to interfere with that revenue stream during the year when it finally allowed the design of replacement helmets for all 32 teams?
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The NFL has come this far, but they need to take it one step further. Think of this as the NFL’s equivalent of the era of car safety standards when airbags became mandatory 30 years after seat belts were worn. And there was a time when baseball players didn’t wear helmets, and when that was required, players didn’t have to use cotton swabs until decades later. The same thing happened with hockey players having to wear helmets, and then visors were eventually added.
Every year, the NFL performs laboratory tests on helmet models that are derivatives of the same design. There are a few obstacles such as having someone more technical than Robert Saleh review Cap Guardian’s data on concussions.
The NFL must answer whether the extra weight, grip of the polyurethane foam and the friction it creates can cause an increase in neck and spine injuries, which would be a costly trade-off. Having a soft and uneven surface means that when two helmets bump into each other, they don’t slide away from each other smoothly, creating torque on the neck. This would probably explain why skilled players in offensive and defensive positions are not required to wear hats.
The NFL shouldn’t leave these helmets on the side of the road ProCap helmet. Padded attachments were worn in the 90s by The Safety of Buffalo Bills Mark Kelso and 49ers Streeter Steve Wallace who swore by their effectiveness. The onion shape was mocked and never went unnoticed, but Ben Straus, the engineer behind ProCap, recently worked with Johns Hopkins University on the Anti-Rotation Kinetic (ARK) helmet concept in 2018. to try to minimize concussion glances.
The NFL can do more to prevent concussion shots. The NFL appoints biomechanical engineers every year who design and test helmets like the ARK or Guardian Caps. Many of them are getting nowhere, but the solution is right in front of them. Forcing players to wear Helmets is the least they can do.
