High-tech helmets and better tackling techniques may save football players from long-term brain injury, but Ivy League schools are going a step further.
Beginning this upcoming season, all eight Ivies will eliminate full-contact hits from their practices. Instead, players will use tackling dummies to practice wrapping up their opponents before gameday.
Over the last decade, traumatic brain injuries have become the most pressing issue for football.
Scientists, parents, coaches, and even players have embraced the inherent risks of the sport.
In particular, a wealth of evidence has shown that the big hits aren't always the most damaging. So-called "sub-concussive hits" — smaller knocks, like those sustained in practice and which athletes generally shrug off — can weaken the brain over time.
Coaches from the Ivy League schools agreed last week to ban tackling from their practices to cut down on these sub-concussive hits. The coaches hope the move will spread to other colleges across the country and, hopefully, trickle down to the high school and youth level.
Dr. Robert Cantu, co-director of Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, says the policy is a no-brainer if schools want to lower the risks of their students getting injured.
"It’s not rocket science," he told The New York Times.
In the absence of player-to-player contact, colleges have gotten creative in how they teach tackling. At Dartmouth College, for instance, players pursue a roving dummy that wears a team jersey.
These tactics aren't designed to cut concussion rates entirely — there is no perfectly safe solution. Nor do they ensure players won't go on to develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a horrible degenerative disease that can only be diagnosed after death and which is thought to result from too many blows to the head.
The best the policy can do is add another layer of protection in a sport whose violence is known, but whose true danger still remains a mystery.
