Football Tackles a Change in Priority
There is only one thing that a football fan hates to see more than their team lose: watching their favorite player sidelined due to a brutal concussion. Recently, both Riverdale Country School and the NFL have attributed the kickoff as one of the main culprits in football’s pervasive concussion problem. While the NFL shortened kickoff distances, Riverdale removed the kickoff from gameplay entirely. Dan King, the athletic trainer at Riverdale, gave some insight on why the rule being changed was so important: “When we eliminated the kickoff in the high school level, we saw a big decrease in concussions.” The most important result, King says, is “eliminating high-speed impact.” It’s basic physics: when two opposing players accelerate to full speed while running towards each other, they’re barrelling towards a big collision, which significantly increases the risk of a major concussion. Changes made in the NFL have also sought to limit high-speed collisions, by ensuring the players are starting closer to where the kick returner receives the ball, lessening the chance of a player getting injured based on high-speed impact.
Sophomore Will Nemo, the varsity football starting quarterback, gave his perspective from a player’s standpoint: “Kickoffs aren’t a huge part of football, and so just limiting the injuries on such a high-risk low-reward kind of play was an important implementation, especially in high school. It barely impacts the game. Most of the time on kickoffs we start at the 25-yard line anyway, and now we start at the 30-yard line. I think it takes away a lot of injuries and it barely impacts the game, so it was a good change to make.”. Coming from a player’s mindset, the change does not dampen the enjoyment the players receive from the game.
The Concussion Legacy Foundation is a foundation focused on research that shows the concussion and CTE rates throughout many sports. According to the Concussion Legacy Foundation, a research organization seeking to reduce serious injuries in sports, once the kickoff rule was revoked, there was a 33% decrease in concussions across the league. Seven schools in the Ivy League had fewer concussions, one remained the same, and only two had increased. In the same time frame, there was an 18% increase in participation across the league, and eight schools increased team enrollment. Since the kickoff rule changed, this has likely led to a decrease in CTE alongside the reduced concussion rate. These changes were necessary because the only neurodegenerative diseases that are preventable, according to the Concussion Foundation Legacy, are CTE and concussions. Making football the safest it can be is necessary so young players do not receive brain trauma that can impact them for the rest of their lives.
Mr. Nelson Arroyo is a middle school English teacher and middle school football coach, and a huge football fan. Mr. Arroyo expressed his thoughts about player safety in football: “If you have an Alabama going against a low-level Division One school, the talent is very real and there is a real big disparity. You have these Alabama boys running down full speed on these UC Santa Barbara kids. They can do some major damage.” This also highlights the idea of mismatched competition, where the physical intensity of the game can be brought into display with major injuries because one team is more talented than the other.
Rules that have been put in place to prevent head injuries have opened the game up to a whole new slew of players who may not have wanted to take such a risk before. This emphasizes the importance of implementing injury-decreasing rules, it allows players to feel safe and to make close friends and family to not worry.
