The NFL reported a 29-percent reduction in concussions during the 2018 regular season compared to the prior year. The league also touted a new crowdsourced competition beginning this spring, the NFL Helmet Challenge, to which it has committed up to $3 million—a huge increase over similar innovation contests that typically offer prize money in the low six figures.
The preliminary 2018 injury data was shared with media on Thursday, and does not specifically attribute the change to individual factors such as rule changes or improved protective equipment. But prior to the season, the league had implemented the so-called “helmet rule,” a personal foul penalty for initiating contact with the head, and revised mandated formations on kickoffs to minimize full-speed collisions. The NFL also made a strong push encouraging players to adopt helmets with higher safety scores in laboratory testing conducted as part of its $60 million Engineering Roadmap.
“That is a significant decrease and one that we’re pleased with, but we’re also more interested in why that decrease happened as opposed to imply what that number is,” said NFL EVP for health and safety Jeff Miller.
The 2017 NFL season had racked up a record 291 reported concussions, prompting a “call to action” from neurosurgeon Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer. The league gathered everyone involved in concussion identification and treatment—from trainers and doctors to unaffiliated neurotrauma consultants—for additional training last summer. Sills’s medical team aimed to increase concussion awareness education around the league and, in particular, met with the seven teams who had the most reported preseason concussions a year ago. He said six of those seven showed a decrease last summer.
“We’re committed to further understanding why it went down this year and how we can leverage that,” Sills said. “We’re also challenged to make sure we share all this information with other levels of play, other sports, so hopefully they can take advantage of what we’ve learned and implement it as well.”
The NFL and NFLPA also banned 10 poor-performing helmets, beginning in the 2019 season, but most of the players wearing them had already switched. Sills said only two percent of players wore those helmet types in 2018, compared to 17 percent in 2017. Notably, a full third of the league began wearing a top-performing helmet for the first time—an increase from 41 percent wearing green-designated top tier helmets to 74 percent. Miller said at least 10 new helmet designs have been developed for upcoming testing, although whether any of them incorporate crowdsourced technology from the league’s HeadHealthTech Challenges is unclear.
Player attitudes were said to change, too, with less resistance to receiving sideline concussion evaluations.
“We have a very low threshold to take a player to the tent,” said Dr. Leigh Ann Curl, the head team orthopedic surgeon for the Baltimore Ravens and president of the NFL Physicians Society. “The process has evolved, and it’s very scripted now. It’s very standardized. We can be confident that what happens in our stadium in Baltimore is what happens on the road … Despite the hype of the game, it’s a smooth process, and the players expect it now.”
The resulting impact of all those factors was stark. The 214 concussions were the fewest in the league since 2014. In 2017, each team averaged one concussion every three games, but in 2018, the rate was one every four games. Preseason concussions also fell by 13 percent.
Christina Mack, an epidemiologist at IQVIA, led the third-party team studying and analyzing the injury data. A full report is expected at the NFL Scouting Combine in late February. Mack’s team reported that the number of major knee injuries—specifically ACL and MCL tears—remained steady. Sills described lower-extremity injuries as the No. 1 cause of players missing time and said those would receive “a major emphasis on injury-reduction strategies” in the coming year.
“Our goal is to take this same data-driven approach that we’ve done for concussions and look at those injuries: understand them, characterize them, consider the equipment, and consider the rules implications, and see if we can make a difference there,” Sills said.
The league conducted a pilot test of a new head impact sensor embedded in a player’s mouthguard developed by Biocore, the private lab overseen by Jeff Crandall, the chairman of the NFL engineering committee. Two dozen players on the University of Virginia football team wore those mouthguards during the 2018 season. The NFL now plans to expand the testing to four of its teams in 2019.
The NFL’s Engineering Committee has already been 3D modeling player cleats and ranking them for safety, but work groups will continue studying footwear, turf, training regiments, and injury mechanics. The league hopes to put identification tags in cleats to have better data on which shoes players are wearing and see if there is a correlation to injuries.
The NFL is in earlier stages of analyzing shoulder pads, but recognizes their increasing importance in the safety conversation as the league minimizes the use of the helmet in tackling. Miller acknowledged that there’s not much existing research on the protective capabilities of various shoulder pads or what impact they have on the player being tackled.
In announcing the Helmet Challenge, Miller said the competition would last about one and a half years but did not disclose other specifics at this time. The league released a player tracking data set last fall to induce innovation around the punt play, in hopes of reducing injuries. The four winners will be revealed at the 1st and Future Competition on Feb. 2.
“When it comes to the health and safety of our players, there’s no finish line,” Miller said. “This is a multi-year process, and we’ll keep at this.”