National Football League Launches Challenge to Improve Facemasks and Reduce Concussions
3 61As Super Bowl Sunday comes to a close, America's National Football League "is challenging innovators to improve the facemask on football helmets to reduce concussions in the game," reports the Associated Press: The league announced on Friday at an innovation summit for the Super Bowl the next round in the HealthTECH Challenge series, a crowdsourced competition designed to accelerate the development of cutting-edge football helmets and new standards for player safety. The challenge invites inventors, engineers, startups, academic teams and established companies to improve the impact protection and design of football helmets through improvements to how facemasks absorb and reduce the effects of contact on the field...
Most progress on helmet safety has come from improvements to the shell and padding, helping to reduce the overall rate of concussions. Working with the helmet industry, the league has brought in position-specific helmets, with those for quarterbacks, for example, having more padding in the back after data showed most concussions for QBs came when the back of the head slammed to the turf. But the facemask has mostly remained the same. This past season, 44% of in-game concussions resulted from impact to the player's facemask, up from 29% in 2015, according to data gathered by the NFL. "What we haven't seen over that period of time are any changes of any note to the facemask," [said Jeff Miller, the NFL's executive vice president overseeing player health and safety]... "Now we see, given the changes in our concussion numbers and injuries to players, that as changes are made to the helmet, fewer and fewer concussions are caused by hits to the shell, and more and more concussions as a percentage are by hits to the facemask..."
Selected winners will receive up to $100,000 in aggregate funding, as well as expert development support to help move their concepts from the lab to the playing field.
Winners will be announced in August, according to the article, "and Miller said he expected helmet manufacturers to start implementing any improvements into helmets soon after that."
3 comments
Right, right. (Score: 5, Insightful)
by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @01:04AM (#65977030)
The NFL has been pretending to care about concussions more or less as long as I can remember; and I'm north of 40 at this point. I suppose it's marginally less pathetic than their "no, of course constant head trauma has no neurological effect whatsoever" stance; but it's still desperately hard to take seriously.
Re:Right, right. (Score: 5, Informative)
by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @08:48AM (#65977440)
The NFL has made major rule changes over the years to avoid concussions.
For example, here are the rule changes that show proper tackling technique of the QB [youtube.com]. I think even a non-player can tell the difference.
How about disincentives to injure other players (Score: 5, Insightful)
by tdelaney ( 458893 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @02:04AM (#65977060)
There are lots of games that use an oval ball and don't wear helmets. All of those have made major moves over the last decades to reduce the likelihood of concussions by making certain moves illegal in the game, with significant penalties. Spear tackles, grabbing around the neck, dumping people head first, slamming the back of the head into the turf, etc.
So why doesn't American football do the same? Penalties can be percentage of salary, reduction of team salary caps, etc to take into account the ridiculous money involved esp. with some players.