How To Build A Better Helmet

There’s a reason why Patrick Mahomes’s helmet looks like that. The nearly $700 piece of headgear protecting the Kansas City Chiefs star quarterback sits high atop his dome in part because of a crowning discovery from decades of testing: Distance makes the head blow softer.

In other words, the more space and time between shell contact and head contact, the better—similar to car crash safety techniques. That’s why today’s helmets are bigger and less rigid than their predecessors. Inside, 3D-printed, collapsible liners compress better than foam to absorb more impact.

Modern progress happened quickly:

• “We’ve seen more change in roughly the last 14 years than we probably did in the previous 40,” the director of the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab—the leading authority in football helmet safety—told the publication Science.
• When the lab started rating headgear in 2011, helmets received top marks (five stars) if they were projected to expose wearers to zero to 10 concussive hits in a season. That cutoff is now zero to 1.86 hits, reflecting how much helmet manufacturers have raised the bar.

Progress can’t come soon enough: At least one in four former NFL players developed CTE, a brain disease caused by repeated head trauma, a new study suggested last week. A New York Giants’ long snapper told Science that he feels the impact of head-to-head collisions less in newer helmets, but…

Their impact on injury prevention is hard to gauge, partially because CTE can only be diagnosed post-mortem. Concussions are down 35% in the NFL since a 2017 peak, but that may also be due in part to league rule changes—including mandatory bubble-like helmet caps during practice. Plus, the league reportedly still averages 0.5 concussions per game.—ML

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