Safer Football, Taught From Inside the Helmet , can safer football be taught, safer football explained

Alan Pelc has been taught how to block since his Houston boyhood, how to push and pulverize and punish oncoming defenders on the football field. This was different. He was learning how not to punish himself. 

 

Right there,” Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz said, pointing at a presentation screen showing more than a dozen arrows pointed straight into the top of a mannequin head. “These are all your recorded hits to the top of your helmet against L.S.U. Every time you drop your head. These are the ones we’re concerned about.”

Scott Trulock, the football program’s head athletic trainer, jumped in: “You’re playing Russian roulette.”
Pelc has heard much lately about head-to-head hits, how they can cause concussions and fracture necks. On Sept. 25, Pelc’s North Carolina Tar Heels played against Eric LeGrand, a Rutgers tackle who weeks later became a quadriplegic on a head-first hit. He has also heard N.F.L. players like the Pittsburgh Steelers’ James Harrison claim that such hits are part of football’s lifeblood.
But at the University of North Carolina, researchers and athletic trainers are using innovative tools to identify and alert players who deliver too many blows with the top of their heads. Accelerometers inside players’ helmets capture the force and location of every impact to their heads. The university began using the program six years ago to alert sideline personnel to particularly hard hits in real time. It has also used it the past few seasons to pinpoint players whose brains are absorbing more impacts than normal — suggesting that they are using their heads in the worst of ways.
Several colleges and high schools have players in helmets equipped with accelerometers, known as the Head Impact Telemetry (HIT) system. But North Carolina may be alone in using it to identify dangerous techniques — which most everyone in football agrees are rampant at every level — and to teach safer play.
A 6-foot-6 and 308-pound senior, Pelc is monstrous and skilled enough to play offensive guard and center in the N.F.L. He said he had never sustained a concussion. But he knows his luck could run out.
“You’re always taught to keep your head up and use your hands, but it’s hard,” Pelc said. “You want to put your whole body into every single block. In the heat of the moment you can put your head down and hit with everything you have.”
He added: “You can change. But it’s hard to get rid of old habits. You just have to work at it.”
Pelc was the third Tar Heel player this week to sit for a talk with Guskiewicz, who oversees the program as chairman of North Carolina’s department of exercise and sports science, and Trulock. Guskiewicz and Trulock declined to identify the first two because, they said, those defensive players were concerned that their professional stock could be hurt by the suggestion that they tackled unsafely. Also, Guskiewicz said that with one player, “we talked about keeping his chest and head up, and I could have read his mind: ‘Yeah, and you played the game when?’ ”
While some players have been predictably dismissive of a computer criticizing the moves that could make them wealthy, Pelc welcomed the information and the chance to discuss its importance. On Wednesday he ambled into Guskiewicz’s campus lab — poignantly named after Matthew Gfeller, a North Carolina high school player who was killed by an on-field brain injury two years ago — sat down in a conference room and listened intently.
According to the HIT system data, in Pelc’s four seasons with the Tar Heels, his head had withstood 85 collisions of more than 100 g’s — comparable to a car moving 35 miles an hour hitting a concrete wall. And 20 percent of those high-impact collisions arrived through the top of his helmet, an alarmingly high rate for a lineman and an indication that he was dropping his head dangerously on blocks.
Some hazardous hits are obvious — particularly those by defenders who launch themselves head-first into oblivious receivers — but those among linemen are often hidden by piles of bodies in football’s trenches. Sure enough, when Guskiewicz’s assistant, Jason Mihalik, used the time stamp on every collision to locate the exact moment on video, Pelc could be seen lowering his head before impact.
“I’m not even realizing it when I’m doing it,” said Pelc, who watched four instances where he could have been seriously hurt — one of them against Rutgers in September. “I need to slow down, bend my knees, and get my feet closer to the guy. Not just stick my head in there.”
Most fractured vertebrae, including that of Rutgers’s LeGrand and dozens of other amateur players over the years, occur when a player’s eyes point down and the top of his helmet absorbs the brunt of a collision, while the rest of the body’s mass keeps moving forward, overwhelming the neck.
Everett Withers, the Tar Heels’ defensive coordinator, said proper tackling technique was “neglected probably more than any other part of the sport.” As many teams have cut back on impact-inducing drills in practice — to lower the risk of unnecessary concussions and other blows — it has probably made games more dangerous. Withers said that only on game days do players tackle at full speed.
“You don’t get to tackle live in practice anymore — you just don’t, because it’s too physical a game,” he said. The HIT system data, Withers added, “makes us cognizant as coaches — O.K., here’s a guy, we have to spend extra time watching him. It makes us aware of players who struggle with leading with their head.”
With the HIT system costing upward of $1,000 per helmet, only the most financially successful college programs — and few high schools — might consider it affordable. (Pelc noted that he chose North Carolina in part because of the program’s use of such technology.) If nothing else, Trulock said, the video that almost all serious programs employ should allow coaches to pinpoint unsafe players as carefully as those who blow assignments. “When you have proof, whether it’s the accelerometers or the video, it really empowers you to get the message across,” he said.
Pelc did not particularly enjoy Wednesday’s session, but he left the meeting eager to change. “I’m going to do better against Florida State this Saturday,” he told Guskiewicz and Trulock. Either way, they’ll know.