08-11-2017, 09:54 AM
(08-11-2017, 09:34 AM)SHRacerX Wrote: This is what a smart person would do to protect themselves, but this is not what greedy owners and league officials will do. Plus, a vast majority of the players come from backgrounds that would not allow them to have the lifestyle they live without football.
I think in the end a modification to the helmets is the next step...make them lighter, but stronger, with a padded "concussion cap" like that one player used to wear. It looked like a mushroom on his head, but it protected him. Hard to believe the league hasn't adopted that across the board just because it looks weird. When padded surface would hit other padded surfaces, it would greatly reduce the impact of the hits.
Legislating the so-called "target area" helps, but then the knees are being taken out. Do they take that out, too? You can live without your knees but you sure can't play without them...
Again, helmets at the NFL level will make very little difference on the concussion issue. A brain inside a body moving at 17 MPH will continue to move at 17 MPH when the body rapidly decelerates to 0 MPH causing it to smash into the inside of your skull. Your brain is like a person driving down the highway in a car without a seat belt. When the car hits a wall the person gets ejected through the windshield into said wall, your brain does the same thing into the inside of your skull. It doesn't matter how good we make the exteriors of the car in absorbing the force (helmets), you are still going through that windshield without a seat belt on.
Now the reason the target area changes matter is because a shot to the head multiplies that force in the opposite direction. If a guy gets hit in the head the momentum of their skull is redirected back towards the brain which is still traveling at that same 17 MPH. This creates even more force when the brain impacts the skull versus getting hit in the waist and your body and neck slightly allowing for deceleration, think of this as cars being built to collapse to try to decelerate.
