Goodell wants to Ban 3-point stances

[DJ Fog]

Wear the david wright helmet

 

[JeremyHight]

Solution: Just put a lot more padding inside the helmets. Anybody ever watch "The Jetsons"?

Kazoo is from the Flintstones, nub.

 

[Liquidrob]

Kazoo is from the Flintstones, nub.

True, but wasnt his name the great Gazoo?

 

[NAHSTE]

True, but wasnt his name the great Gazoo?

True, but shouldn't "Great" be capitalized?

 

[Sven Draconian]

I hate Goddell.

The best way to prevent concussions is the mouth piece. There are severals studies on it. A few years back the Patriots went an entire season without a concussion because they had a dentist mold mouth pieces for them.

Yet, the NFL does not require mouthpieces. QB's never wear them. You want to prevent concussions for a QB? Make him wear a fucking mouthpiece. A slap to the head isn't going to cause his concussion.

DB's never wear them as well. Neither do receivers. Guess who keeps getting knocked the fuck out?

Think about boxing for a moment. What punches lead to the flash knockouts? Uppercuts, and other good shots to the job. Think of Tyson's style. Think of how Douglass beat him. Stiff shot to the jaw?

Why, because a our jaw can't handle the shock when our jaw in improperly aligned, which it usually is when we are doing, well, anything but biting. All the shock from the jaw goes straight to the head. The teeth crunch, that shock goes right up to our brain. Bam. Lights out.

The only way to help that is a mouthpiece that keeps the jaw in line and can absorb some of that shock.

 

[NAHSTE]

I hate Goddell.

The best way to prevent concussions is the mouth piece. There are severals studies on it. A few years back the Patriots went an entire season without a concussion because they had a dentist mold mouth pieces for them.

Yet, the NFL does not require mouthpieces. QB's never wear them. You want to prevent concussions for a QB? Make him wear a fucking mouthpiece. A slap to the head isn't going to cause his concussion.

DB's never wear them as well. Neither do receivers. Guess who keeps getting knocked the fuck out?

Think about boxing for a moment. What punches lead to the flash knockouts? Uppercuts, and other good shots to the job. Think of Tyson's style. Think of how Douglass beat him. Stiff shot to the jaw?

Why, because a our jaw can't handle the shock when our jaw in improperly aligned, which it usually is when we are doing, well, anything but biting. All the shock from the jaw goes straight to the head. The teeth crunch, that shock goes right up to our brain. Bam. Lights out.

The only way to help that is a mouthpiece that keeps the jaw in line and can absorb some of that shock.

I thought about mentioning the mouthpiece thing, but college kids are required to wear them (if I'm not mistaken) and they suffer concussions too. Most of the studies that I have read were conducted at UNC and players are even getting them in practice. Plus there is even data that suggests players who never advance past high school develop the same brain tissue damage.

So while that's a good step, it's not gonna completely solve the problems.

 

[Sven Draconian]

I thought about mentioning the mouthpiece thing, but college kids are required to wear them and they suffer concussions too. Plus there is data that even players who never advance past high school develop the same brain tissue damage.

So while that's a good step, it's not gonna completely solve the problems.

Can you link me to the data on the high school kids? I've never heard that.

"A mouthpiece" and a "Good Mouthpiece" are different as well.

Also, I'm sure concussions will still occur. There are large people banging their heads together at full speed. It's about reducing concussions. The NFL is looking at so many different things, when they have a very easy step they can make to do some real good.

 

[Sportsbuck]

I will never play a down in a game without a mouthpiece... back during my sophomore year one of my teammates ran an in route over the top of me (I was running a drag) and got knocked the fuck out, and he wasn't wearing a mouthpice (he was one of those kids that thought he looked so cool just having it wedged in the top of his facemask during the play) and he got knocked the fuck out and lost 2 teeth.

 

[NAHSTE]

Can you link me to the data on the high school kids? I've never heard that.

"A mouthpiece" and a "Good Mouthpiece" are different as well.

Also, I'm sure concussions will still occur. There are large people banging their heads together at full speed. It's about reducing concussions. The NFL is looking at so many different things, when they have a very easy step they can make to do some real good.

All the data I received was from the same Malcolm Gladwall article from NYT magazine:

Football, dogfighting, and brain damage : The New Yorker

McKee got up and walked across the corridor, back to her office. “There’s one last thing,” she said. She pulled out a large photographic blowup of a brain-tissue sample. “This is a kid. I’m not allowed to talk about how he died. He was a good student. This is his brain. He’s eighteen years old. He played football. He’d been playing football for a couple of years.” She pointed to a series of dark spots on the image, where the stain had marked the presence of something abnormal. “He’s got all this tau. This is frontal and this is insular. Very close to insular. Those same vulnerable regions.” This was a teen-ager, and already his brain showed the kind of decay that is usually associated with old age. “This is completely inappropriate,” she said. “You don’t see tau like this in an eighteen-year-old. You don’t see tau like this in a fifty-year-old.”

That’s why, Cantu says, so many of the ex-players who have been given a diagnosis of C.T.E. were linemen: line play lends itself to lots of little hits. The HITS data suggest that, in an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times, which means that a ten-year N.F.L. veteran, when you bring in his college and high-school playing days, could well have been hit in the head eighteen thousand times: that’s thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side, stretching and weakening and tearing the connections among nerve cells, and making the brain increasingly vulnerable to long-term damage.

We also tend to focus on the dramatic helmet-to-helmet hits that signal an aggressive and reckless style of play. Those kinds of hits can be policed. But what sidelined the U.N.C. player, the first time around, was an accidental and seemingly innocuous elbow, and none of the blows he suffered that day would have been flagged by a referee as illegal. Most important, though, is what Guskiewicz found when he reviewed all the data for the lineman on that first day in training camp. He didn’t just suffer those four big blows. He was hit in the head thirty-one times that day. What seems to have caused his concussion, in other words, was his cumulative exposure.

Would better helmets help? Perhaps. And there have been better models introduced that absorb more of the shock from a hit. But, Nowinski says, the better helmets have become—and the more invulnerable they have made the player seem—the more athletes have been inclined to play recklessly.
“People love technological solutions,” Nowinski went on. “When I give speeches, the first question is always: ‘What about these new helmets I hear about?’ What most people don’t realize is that we are decades, if not forever, from having a helmet that would fix the problem. I mean, you have two men running into each other at full speed and you think a little bit of plastic and padding could absorb that 150 gs of force?”

Next to the computer was an antenna that received the signals from the sensors inside the players’ helmets. Mihalik crouched down and began paging through the data. In one column, the HITS software listed the top hits of the practice up to that point, and every few moments the screen would refresh, reflecting the plays that had just been run on the field. Forty-five minutes into practice, the top eight head blows on the field measured 82 gs, 79 gs, 75 gs, 79 gs, 67 gs, 60 gs, 57 gs, and 53 gs. One player, a running back, had received both the 79 gs and the 60 gs, as well as another hit, measuring 27.9 gs. This wasn’t a full-contact practice. It was “shells.” The players wore only helmets and shoulder pads, and still there were mini car crashes happening all over the field.

The dog fighting comparisons are a bit of a leap but there are some solid points here.

I agree that mouthpieces are an easy and necessary step, but it's not a cure-all. The bottom line is football is a violent game by nature and playing it greatly increases your risk of dementia and brain damage.

 

[steeljake]

the way they make the helmets, the outside layer absorbs most of the blow any way. the extra padding on the outside wouldn't do much. the point of the matter is, the head is still taking so much punishment because they're still smacked around in the inside of the helmet. unfortunately, they have not discovered a super-solution to this problem

actually... a concussion is caused by the brain bouncing off the skull as the head is either put in motion, changes directions or is stopped suddenly. much like a jar of pickles. the jar stops, but the pickles still bang up against the glass. the helmets can help absorb the blow and disapate some of the energy (which is what the revolution helmets do i think) but the only real way to ever avoid a concussion would be to either stop taking head shots or to actaully secure the brain inside the skull.

 

[Fox1994]

I thought about mentioning the mouthpiece thing, but college kids are required to wear them (if I'm not mistaken) and they suffer concussions too. Most of the studies that I have read were conducted at UNC and players are even getting them in practice. Plus there is even data that suggests players who never advance past high school develop the same brain tissue damage.

So while that's a good step, it's not gonna completely solve the problems.

The only thing that's gonna completely solve the problem is if these folk stop playing football.

 

[Sven Draconian]

All the data I received was from the same Malcolm Gladwall article from NYT magazine:

Football, dogfighting, and brain damage : The New Yorker

I never liked that article (and this isn't an attack at you, just the article). Not because it "attacked football" more becaue it is in no-way "scientific" despite presenting itself as such. Just for starters:

1) They don't know what "Tau" does if anything.
2) They don't actually know what causes Tau
3) They don't konw what these people do besides football.

It's readily acknowledged we know almost nothing about the brain, and we know nothing about alzheimers. Yet, based on looking at a pretty limited sample of brains we know what is happening now?

For example, if said 18 year old has the Tau of a 70 year old man with Alzheimers, shouldn't he be suffering from it? What is the Tau doing. They can't really answer that, but they'll certainly point out the correlation. Bad science.

It's a launching point for more investigation (and, rightly so), but there is such a massive over-reaction to something we think we migh thave found but we aren't really sure what it means yet.

 

[NAHSTE]

I never liked that article (and this isn't an attack at you, just the article). Not because it "attacked football" more becaue it is in no-way "scientific" despite presenting itself as such. Just for starters:

1) They don't know what "Tau" does if anything.
2) They don't actually know what causes Tau
3) They don't konw what these people do besides football.

It's readily acknowledged we know almost nothing about the brain, and we know nothing about alzheimers. Yet, based on looking at a pretty limited sample of brains we know what is happening now?

For example, if said 18 year old has the Tau of a 70 year old man with Alzheimers, shouldn't he be suffering from it? What is the Tau doing. They can't really answer that, but they'll certainly point out the correlation. Bad science.

It's a launching point for more investigation (and, rightly so), but there is such a massive over-reaction to something we think we migh thave found but we aren't really sure what it means yet.

I agree that it's not totally reliable. I don't really like Malcolm Galdwell either, he tries to push pop science on uninformed masses so he comes off as a genius. But somewhere in there the lady acknowledges that she needs to see at least 50 more samples to determine anything, which could take decades.

The concussion research at UNC is certainly interesting though. If guys are suffering concussions in practice, even in shells, that's a little troubling.

 

[Sven Draconian]

Yea, the UNC thing was eye-opening. Very good stuff. The only issue I had with it was that it's the helmet that is taking that impact, not the skull itself. I'd really like to know how much of that force is being absorbed and defelcted by the helmet.

It's similar to the sports science show where they show how much "force" Urlacher hits you with, and have him tackle a dummy with a sensor in it. Sure, if he hits a stationary object with direct contact. However, rarely, if ever, do two players make direct contact without defelcting off.