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For high school players who aren’t as big or fast, Erin and Lee Hanson, who invented the Guardian Cap a decade ago, claim the reduction has been tested up to 33%.
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After the Jacksonville Jaguars experimented with them in 2020, the NFL approved use of the cap in practice for offensive and defensive linemen this year. It was determined those groups take more helmet collisions during a week of practice than they do in a game. So, though it is not marketed as a concussion-preventing device, the cap could theoretically help reduce the rate of concussions.
The NFL didn’t move forward with the caps without approval from the NFL Players Association. The NFLPA, a spokesperson told ESPN.com, allowed players to use the cap for practice on a voluntary basis in 2021. Twenty-three teams began camp with the caps on an experimental basis.
“Ten percent is a substantial amount of force to be reduced when somebody has a helmet contact,” said Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president of health and safety initiatives. “We’ll have a better appreciation for it after this year, when we have a better sense of how many players use it, how frequently they’ve used it, and how our concussion numbers at those player positions look.”
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“There’s things we still don’t understand about how that device might react in an uncontrolled environment,” Good said. “It’ll be important to collect that feedback before making a decision on whether it should be used in games.”
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“Understanding the chaotic environment is a little less predictable.”
Dr. Katherine Breedlove, whose work as a research associate at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston focuses on sports-related concussions, determined during her 2017 independent study that the risk of neck injury was minimal.
She said the other concern is that the foam used in the cap doesn’t have a quick rebound “so that each time it’s hit it was in its best shape.
“The data from my paper pretty solidly says, ‘Yes, maybe [it helps limit concussions],’ and so we need to find out more,” she said. “It’s not a conclusive, no. But it’s not a conclusive yes. Maybe this will be helpful for the NFL to do this targeted sample.”
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“Way back in 2010, the standard for football helmets was called a drop test,” Erin Hanson said, when asked why it took the NFL so long to come on board. “That’s dropping a helmet right down onto a plate and measuring the force.
“But not a single football player out there drops out of the sky onto his head. So as testing has evolved, now they’re doing rotational forces. The NFL has invested a lot of money in replicating hits.”
That change began around 2017, when researchers began using a pneumatic ram and adjustable table to determine the effectiveness of the cap – and helmet – on impacts from all different angles.
NFL technology has advanced to the point that some players wear sensors in their mouth guard to provide data on impact. That’s information that can’t be replicated in a laboratory.
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“We’ve taken a look at more than a thousand concussions on-field and tried to repeat [the hits] in the laboratory,” Miller said. “We added the Guardian Cap to the helmet impacts in the lab and measured the forces that those Guardian Caps mitigated from reaching the helmet in the head.”
Good and Breedlove agreed that the mouth-guard sensors provide more accurate data because they are positioned centrally closer to the brain than sensors that were on the surface of the helmet.
Miller said getting feedback and data from actual use will help even more as the NFL determines whether it will offer the caps to other positions next year.
Rams Dr. Casey Batten said players have given him no reason to suggest a downside to the caps.
“Other than the first few days when players complained of it slipping or how it looked funny in the shadows, we haven’t heard any complaints,” he said. “We haven’t had any issues with it.”
Whether the caps will help prevent concussions or head trauma, Batten said the “frank answer is we don’t know.”
He reminded the cap still is in the experimental stages and the results of this season will help determine whether the league expands use to other positions in the future.
“You’d have to look at several seasons here on out to really make heads or tails of whether the Guardian Cap really is reducing concussions or not,” he said. “For us, we’re just trying to see how this works in the real world.”
ESPN Los Angeles Rams reporter Lindsey Thiry contributed to this story.
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This post was last modified on Tháng mười một 27, 2024 5:56 chiều