Wow. Breakthrough in Reducing Concussions?

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Joe El-Khoury
April 13, 2023 (9:50 PM)

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Exciting news for football fans: The NFL and NFLPA have given the green light to the first-ever helmet designed to reduce concussions for quarterbacks. According to a recent report from The Associated Press, the innovative helmet comes from Vicis, a leading manufacturer in football equipment.

One of the most important features of this new helmet is its ability to minimize the severity of impacts between a quarterback's head and the ground. In fact, league data shows that this type of impact is responsible for about half of all quarterback concussions. This is a particularly relevant issue in light of Miami quarterback Tua Tagovailoa's injury last season, when his head hit the turf with great force during a Thursday night game against the Cincinnati Bengals.

In a memo sent to team executives on Thursday, the NFL reported that the Vicis helmet designed to reduce concussions for quarterbacks performed 7% better than the most popular helmet worn by quarterbacks last season. This is a significant improvement and underscores the effectiveness of the new technology.

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Jason Neubauer, a Vicis executive, confirmed that the company started working on the Zero2 Matrix QB helmet back in early 2022.

According to Neubauer:

The unique thing is that it has a deformal outer shell, which means when you take an impact in any location on that helmet, it will deform or basically dent in that location to absorb the impact," Neubauer said. "What that means for us, as designers or engineers, as we're looking to optimize it for different types of impacts, we're able to change unique locations to try to optimize the impact mitigation in any one area.

Here is what NFL executive Jeff Miller told the AP regarding the new helmets:

We've now analyzed with our engineers and with the players' association more than a thousand concussions on field, we have a pretty good database of how these injuries occur. This helmet performs better in laboratory testing than any helmets we have ever seen for those sorts of impacts.

While these helmets are specifically for quarterbacks, Miller had more to say regarding this latest technology benefiting other positions as well:

Hopefully we can continue to stimulate that either with position-specific helmets designed for each position group or for a general all-purpose helmet to be able to say to players: 'Work with us, be willing to change helmets, because better and better products are coming online every year.'

It's fantastic to see the NFL and NFLPA taking steps to protect players from serious head injuries. With this new helmet now approved for use, quarterbacks will have access to even more advanced equipment designed to keep them safe on the field.

As seen on - NFL, NFLPA approve helmet designed to reduce QB concussions

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13 AVRIL \| 46 ANSWERS Wow. Breakthrough in Reducing Concussions? Should the league force all teams to use these new helmets?
Yes	35	76.1 %
No	11	23.9 %
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