NFL Enforces Equipment Ban on Tom Brady, 31 Others
The subject of concussion science in football may be a fierce debate involving doctors, teams, fans, parents, and players at every level of the sport, but a far less controversial idea is that fewer head injuries are a good thing.
To that end, the NFL and the players’ union work together to create lists of approved equipment that can be used on the field.
The NFL and NFLPA jointly announced Friday that they have added 11 new helmets to their list of approved equipment after those helmets passed a battery of safety tests in the lab.
The @NFL / @NFLPA’s annual helmet poster is used by players to choose the best equipment. About 50% of players upgraded to a better performing helmet after the issuing of last year’s poster. Check out the 2019 poster here: https://t.co/W9H949EJSD pic.twitter.com/bQtpvuCeTb
— NFL Football Operations (@NFLFootballOps) April 12, 2019
They also announced that the grace period for older equipment that did not pass the new, higher standards has come to an end.
So 32 players have to change their helmets this season, but what really makes this noteworthy is that one of them is New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who will have to make a run at a seventh Super Bowl championship with a new brain bucket.
According to ESPN, Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president for health and safety initiatives, said that the conversion to approved equipment for the old helmets is “eminently doable”—the sole sticking point seems to be players like Brady who have been in the league forever and gotten used to a specific piece of equipment feeling like the new helmet will disrupt their rhythm or feel for the game.
The NFL is not messing around with this; they distributed a poster Friday to all 32 teams’ equipment managers showing them exactly which helmets are and are not allowed along with a directive to remove all banned helmets.
The NFLPA, for its part, celebrated the progress that has been made in building helmets that follow the automotive industry’s lead of effectively saying that there will always be collisions but that doesn’t mean there has to be carnage along with it.
Miller, speaking to reporters, said only that teams violating the order will be “subject to league discipline,” per ESPN.
What that discipline might be was not made clear.
Since 2015, the league and the players have been working together to test and introduce new helmets, but 2018 was the first season in which the two groups agreed to ban previously existing helmets.
Six models were banned immediately; another four, including Brady’s Riddell VSR-4, were given one more year before players would have to find a new helmet to use.
Speaking of the car industry, the helmet testing process, conducted by Biokinetics Inc. in Canada, isn’t all that dissimilar to the way cars are tested for crash safety.
According to Dr. Jeff Crandall, chairman of the NFL’s engineering committee, they stick the helmets on crash test dummies and then simply slam the dummies into things (or slam things into the dummies) in order to test linear accelerations like a kickoff returner getting pasted by an unblocked member of the kickoff team, rotational accelerations like those you’d expect from blindside hits and 15-yard face-mask penalties, and velocity, to give an idea of the difference between that open-field tackle on a kickoff and something like the multiple subconcussive hits so often brought up when talking about possible brain damage in offensive and defensive linemen.
This, in Crandall’s words, “characterizes the ability of the helmet to manage the forces of impact.”
It also provides something conveniently measurable for the layman that can be sold to players, who often don’t like having to change equipment they’ve become accustomed to.
“One of the things that prevented some players from moving,” Crandall said, “might have been about comfort or fit or aesthetics of the helmet, not necessarily the safety. But there is a wide number of (approved helmets) that are comparable in the aesthetics now. We’re optimistic that this will lead to a migration of folks.”
The VICIS Zero1 helmet topped the list of safest helmets for the third straight year, and who knows—finding out a player is wearing it might up your chances of winning your fantasy league when he walks away from a hit that might’ve put a player with a less safe helmet into concussion protocol.
When football gets safer without fundamentally changing the artful brutality that is part and parcel of the game, everybody wins—the teams, the players, and the fans. The NFL and NFLPA now get to try and convince Tom Brady and 31 of his comrades in football arms of that.
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