Turkey and football are two of Thanksgiving’s biggest traditions, but as teams across America take the field this holiday weekend, the sport is tackling growing concerns about player safety with a big focus on concussions.
Miami Dolphins Quarterback Tua Tagovailoa has become one of the faces ofThanksgiving’s the worry.
He suffered the third diagnosed concussion of his NFL career earlier this year but has returned to the field and leads his team against the Packers on Thanksgiving Day.
At the collegiate level, two quarterbacks have retired this season, citing concerns about concussions.
All of this happening as the sport is trying to figure out how to make the game safer from Pop Warner to the pros.
Football practice at Lanier High School in Georgia looks a little different this year.
“You’ve seen it in colleges and in the pros. And I think nowadays we’re always looking for different ways to help protect our kids,” said Lanier head coach Tyler Maloof.
Enter padded covers like the guardian cap, which slips over a player’s helmet with the goal of adding an extra layer of protection.
The NFL has embraced the technology amid calls to improve safety.
This season, for the first time, players are allowed to wear the caps during regular-season games.
The league began requiring them in 2022 for most players during certain practices.
“We saw a decrease in concussions of about 50% from the affected position groups,” said Jeff Miller, an executive vice president with the NFL.
The NFL has not released the data behind its claims.
Guardian Sports which makes the guardian cap points to its own testing as well as years of use by college and professional players as proof the padded coverings reduce injuries -- with one caveat.
“We don’t like to use concussion as a metric of what the guardian cap does or doesn’t do,” said Jake Hanson with Guardian Sports. “What we know is that the guardian cap reduces those non-concussive blows.”
Several groups of independent researchers recently tested guardian caps in the lab and on the field and the results have been mixed.
Some studies found small benefits in reducing impacts to the head and brain.
But others showed no positive difference between players wearing caps and those who don’t.
“There’s no helmet right now, there’s no helmet add-on that can eliminate concussion risk,” said Nicholas Cecchi, author of a Stanford study on guardian caps. “And more work needs to be done on those repeated sub concussive blows or the lower velocity impacts that our younger athletes are exposed to.”
And that’s important because mounting scientific evidence shows repeated hits to the head – even if they don’t cause concussions – can have lasting impacts on the brain like chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE, a progressive degenerative brain disease.
“The mystery of CTE is starting to disappear in football,” said Chris Nowinski with the Concussion Legacy Foundation. “We’re figuring out why people are getting it and it’s essentially a math problem. It’s the number of hits and the strength of the hits that someone takes over their lifetime. So, the best analogy is probably smoking and lung cancer, the more cigarettes, the longer you do, the greater your risk.”
Concerns that are having an impact on the sport as leagues and teams change rules and try new technologies in attempts to make the game safer.of