College football players suffered far more concussions during training than at games, medical researchers reported on Monday, a finding that will certainly add to the years’ debate over regulating training regimes across the sport.
Much less clear is whether the college sports industry will nationalize security reforms like those adopted by the NFL, which limits the number of total contact practices per season, or some university conferences. But with the NCAA and its members facing urgent decisions on other fronts, including the coronavirus pandemic, new far-reaching rules are unlikely to be forthcoming.
The authors of the new study, published in JAMA Neurology, a peer-reviewed journal, found that 72 percent of the concussions they reviewed over five seasons of college football took place during practice. And while preseason training accounted for about a fifth of the time the researchers studied, they found that almost half of the concussions occurred during that period.
Changes to the rules governing the games, they wrote, “are an important component in protecting athletes during competition”, but they said that reviews of training activities before and during the season “could lead to a substantial reduction” in concussions .
“The biggest surprise was the extent of the data, not just the trend of the data,” said Dr. Michael A. McCrea, lead author of the study and professor of neurosurgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where he is co-director of the Center for Neurotrauma Research.
“Most people, scientists or not, are aware that there is more total contact activity in the preseason than in the regular season, so I’m not sure if the trend of this discovery is a surprise,” he continued. “But maybe the magnitude of it.”
In an editorial also published in JAMA Neurology on Monday, two other brain injury experts described the study’s findings as “shocking”, particularly given the statistics on concussions and exposure to impact on the head, known as HIE, during contractually regulated practices in the NFL
Professional teams cannot perform more than 14 padded workouts during the regular season. In the 2019 NFL regular season, less than 7 percent of concussions occurred during practice, according to league data.
“Crashes in games are inevitable, but cracks in practice are preventable,” wrote experts in their editorial, Dr. Robert C. Cantu and Christopher J. Nowinski, who were not the authors of the study led by McCrea. “Training is a controlled situation in which coaches have almost complete authority over the risks of HIE assumed by players”.
While acknowledging that the NCAA had issued recommendations and pushed for broader changes, they pointedly noted that “guidelines are not rules”
The NCAA, which obtains its authority from member schools, did not immediately comment on Monday.
In a speech in January, Mark Emmert, the president of the NCAA, said that the association “has made wonderful advances over concussion protocols”, perhaps a reference to a 2015 mandate that all schools at a Power 5 conference present annually. its concussion guidelines for review by a national committee. (This procedure was waived during the coronavirus pandemic.)
During his speech at the NCAA convention, Emmert, without elaboration, asked for the addition of “a few teeth to our health and safety protocols” and said there should be a system that “held each other accountable for the commitments we made to promote, defend and conduct these protocols. ”
But the NCAA’s legislative process is tiring, and few sports companies are as extensive and disjointed as the top division of college football. Although the NCAA limits practice time and imposes rules on issues such as transfers and recruitment, conferences that play football within Division I have enormous day-to-day power and define policies that can vary from one league to another.
In 2016, for example, the Ivy League – which plays in the football league subdivision, not the Football Bowl subdivision, which attracts most of the money and attention – banned full contact arrangements during all regular season practice. The rule holds true, the editorial noted, almost five years later.
The NCAA itself often adheres to what it describes as “recommendations” to combat the risk of concussion, including that three days of practice per week during the regular season should involve no or minimal contact. The NCAA approach, the study authors said, “had a limited effect in reducing the incidence of concussions before the season.”
The findings published on Monday were slow to make. In the study, conducted at six Division I schools participating in a research consortium partially funded by the NCAA and the Pentagon, 658 football players wore helmets equipped with accelerometers.
At the end of the 2019 season, when the study was completed after recording more than 528,000 head hits in five seasons, 68 of the monitored players suffered concussions. The researchers followed players from the Air Force, Army, North Carolina, UCLA, Virginia Tech and Wisconsin. Spring practices were not included, McCrea said.
Crucially, the researchers found variations in head impact exposure between individual players, even among teammates who play in the same position, McCrea said.
“Certain teams practice differently than other teams, and certain players play differently than other players,” said McCrea.
In addition to any comprehensive strategy that may emerge, he said, athletes should engage in more localized efforts to try to reduce risks.
“There is a shared responsibility here: in the scientists who produce the evidence, in the policy makers, in the institutions and in the coaches and players,” he said. “I think we all have a responsibility.”