Football has taken a lot of hits lately as mounting research shows that the concussions some players suffer boosts their risk for dementia[1] and other brain maladies. Former pro players sued the NFL[2] , claiming the league had failed them. Worried parents began wondering if they should let their children play football[3] . And some fans began to question the morality of watching football games[4] , given the risk players face.
Football isn’t about to go away, of course. But some experts say football helmets should. They say helmets offer little protection and argue for a helmet-free version of the game. Other experts say helmets save lives, plain and simple.
What do you think? Should football helmets stay in the game—or be tossed out? Before tackling that question, read what two leading experts have to say.
On one side of our exclusive debate is Dr. Ainissa Ramirez, a former professor of engineering at Yale University and the author of Newton’s Football: The Science Behind America’s Game. Her opponent in our online debate is Dr. Robert Cantu, clinical professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Boston University Medical School, co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University Medical Center, and senior advisor to the NFL’s Head, Neck and Spine Committee.
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Football Helmets Should Be Banned
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Football needs an intervention. It's like our favorite uncle, who we know has a problem that the family has long ignored. But, now we've reached a crisis that we can't overlook -- an epidemic in concussions and a link to degenerative brain diseases caused by tackling with the head.
That's why my co-author, Allen St. John, and I are proposing banning helmets in professional football.
Hear us out.
Football needs what Thomas Kuhn, the MIT professor who was a pioneer in the history of science, called a "paradigm shift." In his landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argued that fundamental change doesn't come in small, gradual increments. It comes suddenly, seemingly from nowhere, in the form of radical, drastic shifts. A revolution, if you will. And the prospect of playing football without a helmet -- as outrageous as it sounds -- could be the catalyst for football's long overdue paradigm shift.
The first thing to understand is that football is much more complicated than it seems. Cal Tech professor John Doyle argues that you need to think of football as a dynamic system; it acts like a big blobby organism. If you poke it here, it will change somewhere else. A small shift can create big changes down the road. And unexpected ones.
When writing Newton's Football[5] , Allen and I found one striking example of this kind of small change -- the introduction of the facemask. The introduction of the first modern football helmet 60 years ago changed the game, but not in the way you might think.
During a game in 1953, Otto Graham, a star quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, got a huge gash on his face. Coach Paul Brown realized that one more hit like that could put Graham out for the season, so he jury-rigged a crude facemask that attached to Graham's plastic helmet. This facemask protected Graham's vulnerable cheek and helped the Browns advance to the NFL championship game.
But it did something bigger. As the facemask became widely used, it changed the way the game was played. Before the facemask, a player wouldn't dream of hitting an opponent with his head. Why? Because he'd break his nose. But with a facemask protecting him from these kind of bloody injuries, a player was now willing to hit headfirst. The facemask changed the game, but it didn't make it safer. It made it more dangerous.
That's because today's football helmets don't protect players against concussions.
If introducing a helmet that's not as protective as it seems caused the game's head injury epidemic, then maybe eliminating helmets might have the opposite effect.
Mike Ditka, a legendary player and a Super Bowl winning coach, has argued[6] in favor of getting rid of the facemask. "I said a long time ago if you want to change the game, take the mask off the helmet. A lot of pretty boys aren't going to stick their face in there." The late Joe Paterno echoed this sentiment, long before controversy ended his tenure at Penn State, by saying, "Then, you would get back to shoulder blocking and shoulder tackling and you wouldn't have all those heroes out there."
The pro-helmet side of the debate will argue that people will die on the field without a helmet.
Not so fast. That assumes that players will play the game exactly as they did before. Our position is that a radical change in equipment will result in a radically different way of playing the game. There are other contact sports in which players don't wear helmets -- from soccer to basketball to rugby and Australian Rules football -- and overall they're safer than football.
The problem of head injuries is a complex and multi-pronged one, and while high-tech helmets and genetic studies represent positive steps, the quickest and most direct way to address the problem is to simply stop players from hitting each other with their heads. So far this hasn't been easy. Head trauma studies, rule changes, and hefty fines haven't made much of a dent in the problem. That's because there's a disconnect between the infraction and the penalty.
But if a player realizes that what he's risking isn't a chance at a brain injury a few years down the road, or a possible fine from the league, but a bloodied nose or a shattered cheekbone that will take him out of the game right now, that's likely to get his attention.
There's a term in psychology that addresses this: compensatory behavior. Studies have shown that people modify their behavior toward a certain pre-set "balance point" of risk. For example, people driving cars loaded with safety features tend to drive faster than they would drive a normal car.
It also works in reverse. By eliminating a perceived safety measure -- like a helmet -- players would naturally take less risk.
Especially if they were given an alternative to tackling with the head. Ask Bobby Hosea. A nationally known youth coach, Hosea's concern for his son and his 12-year-old teammates convinced him to create a radical new method of tackling that gets the head out of harm's way. Hosea's star student, Dashon Goldson, is a Pro Bowl defensive back and is known as one of the league's hardest hitters. Safer hits don't need to be boring.
A radical idea such as a helmet-free NFL is a serious thought experiment that will catalyze change, particularly if we gather the best minds in football and from outside the game to consider it. If we don't do something revolutionary -- and a little bit crazy -- like this, football will continue to face the same problems with head injuries. Football's head injury crisis is fundamentally a behavioral problem and the quickest way to change behavior is to at least consider taking players' noggins out of those plastic shells that allow them to use their heads as weapons.
It is time for football's paradigm shift and a radical intervention. Let's help our crazy uncle help himself.
Ainissa G. Ramirez, Ph.D. is dedicated to making science understandable to the general public. Before taking on the call to popularize science, she was a mechanical engineering professor at Yale University for ten years. She is the author of Save Our Science (TED Books), which is based on her TED talk. She also co-wrote with Allen St. John the forthcoming title, Newton's Football (Random House), which looks at the stealthy science behind the game.
In 1905 American Football experienced its first great crisis where many called for its abolition. The previous year there had been 18 deaths and 156 catastrophic injuries at a time when participation figures were small compared to today. This was a time when helmets were not worn by most and those in existence were little more than pieces of leather. Skull fractures and intracranial hemorrhages were the major cause of death and catastrophic injury.
It took Theodore Roosevelt's supportive leadership to save the day and out of meetings of University presidents came not only rules changes to make the sport safer but the formation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to promote the health and welfare of the student athlete. Thus the "mend it or end it" crisis was settled by rules changes eliminating some of the most injurious practices, forming the NCAA and instating the forward pass to open up the game.
The second major crisis that football encountered occurred in 1968 when there were 38 fatalities due to the skills of the sport. Half of the deaths occurred in the act of tackling or being tackled and all were either from a head injury (30) or cervical spinal cord injury (6). Twenty-six of the deaths were at the high school level, 5 collegiate, 6 sandlot, and 1 professional. During the 1961-1970 time period there were 244 fatalities with cerebral hemorrhage accounting for 73.4 percent and cervical spinal cord injuries 16.4 percent.
Football was once again in a crisis period and something had to be done to reduce the number of fatalities and catastrophic injuries. The football community led by Walter Byers, Executive Director of the NCAA and G. E. Morgan, a consultant of Riddell Helmets and representing the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association, combined to form the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE) in 1969. Its major immediate focus was to use the science known at the time to develop standards for equipment to protect first the head and also the neck.
In 1970 work began to establish the first football helmet standard under the direction of V. R. Hodgson at Wayne State University. Three years later in September 1973 the NOCSAE Helmet Impact Standard was published. The standard was set at a level, Severity Index (SI) of
The efficacy of the improved helmets has been borne out by a reduction in fatalities over the ensuing 30 years to an average of 4 per year down from 38, and an 80 percent reduction in intracranial bleeding (subdural hematomas).
Now in the last few years football is facing its third crisis, this one about concussions and sub-concussive blows leading to brain damage that may not be seen for many years, as with most cases of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Some would argue that taking the helmets off might correct this problem and I would agree it would lessen blows to the head. But at what price?! I would argue that to remove helmets would lead to the skull fracture and subdural hematoma deaths seen in the prior crises of 1905 and 1968.
The father of American Football is Walter Camp who in 1880 modified the rules of rugby to form the game of football. I would argue that removing helmets from football players would reduce the incidence of concussion but would replace it with an epidemic of skull fractures and subdural hematoma deaths.
I believe the answer to reducing the concussion rate in football is to hold officials accountable to the current rules in place since 1972 that state the head (helmet) must not be the initial point of contact in blocking and tackling. There should be no intentional use of the head permitted in these activities.
Furthermore there should be reduced full contact hitting in practice similar to the NFL that allows only 14 full contact practices in 18 during the season and none during the off season. This would reduce concussive and sub-concussive blows to the head by up to 75 percent. Is it not ironic that NFL football players take less head trauma than our college, high school, and our youth?
Dr. Robert C. Cantu is clinical professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Boston University School of Medicine and co-director of the Center for The Study Of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University Medical Center. In addition, he is a senior advisor to the NFL's Head, Neck and Spine Committee and medical director of the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at Chapel Hill, N.C.
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Football Helmets Should Be Banned
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Ainissa G. Ramirez, Ph.D.Robert C. Cantu, M.D.Neither argumenthas changed the most minds
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References
- ^ concussions some players suffer boosts their risk for dementia (www.cdc.gov)
- ^ sued the NFL (www.theguardian.com)
- ^ let their children play football (www.pbs.org)
- ^ the morality of watching football games (www.cbc.ca)
- ^ Newton's Football (www.randomhouse.com)
- ^ argued (www.post-gazette.com)
- ^ Share (www.huffingtonpost.com)
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