With each game of football, the chances of a player getting hurt increases, even as new technology claims to protect against the risk of injury.
Football is not a safe sport, and there should be more protections to ensure the health of players.
A serious issue comes up with any topic of contact sport — head injuries.
A 2023 National Institutes of Health article by Sharon Reynolds said for every additional year spent playing football, there was a 15% increase in being diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and a 14% increase in developing severe CTE for those with CTE.
NYU Langone’s High School Bioethics Project found that CTE can lead to symptoms such as depression, memory loss and an inability to control impulses.
These symptoms can appear years later after a football player’s career ends. So it is imperative to find ways to address this.
In October, the National Football League (NFL) reported to have the “fewest number of concussions” in the 2024 preseason. One reason for this: new helmets models that provide the same level of protection as helmets with Guardian Caps, and sometimes even more protection.
Even the newest equipment can’t stop the fact that players are still hitting each other. In an CBS News interview, sports medicine doctor Marco Alcala said, “‘It’s not the equipment that’s stopping the concussion because these people, they slam into each other, and they still have a concussion,’” and even the best helmet won’t stop the brain from shaking in the skull.
In the same article, CBS News reports two schools where few to no players wear Guardian Caps.
There needs to be more regulations for this kind of discrepancy.
Earlier this year, a joint effort by the NFL and Amazon Web Services (AWS) led to the use of artificial intelligence (AL) and machine learning (ML) to predict and prevent injuries, among other things. The Digital Athlete platform runs “millions of simulations of NFL games and specific in-game scenarios to inform teams which players are at the highest risk,” which then creates personalized profiles that show how to avoid injury.
The issue here is that a machine is not physically playing in the actual field, where anything can happen. Human players can be unpredictable.
With the 2025 Super Bowl around the corner, it is important to consider that some of these players will compete and come home with injuries that might follow them for the rest of their lives.
It’s time to consider new safety measures to protect the players and continue enjoyment of the sport.