NFL football is by far the most popular sport in the US, followed by college football (a state-of-affairs oddly similar to the fact that the world’s largest air force is the US Air Force, followed by the US Navy’s air force). It is impossible to imagine a world in which Americans don’t become obsessed with football for six or so months out of the year. At the same time, in an era where people are aware of the existence of concussions and CTE, watching football still leaves you with the occasional sense that you’re watching something that might not be around forever.
Of course, since the sport is tied to such an overwhelmingly complex number of commercial nodes, anything remotely resembling a ban on football would surely crash the US economy, and that of the globe along with it, so tireless efforts persist from all angles to ensure football’s longevity. One manifestation of this is the NFL’s long-term push to grow flag football as a serious version of the sport. But engineers have also made considerable strides in improving the quality of football helmets, a field largely enabled by additive manufacturing (AM).
Upon impact, the compression rate for regular football helmets stands at around 50 percent, while helmets that include liners designed with 3D printed lattices compress between 80 and 90 percent. According to the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab, an institution that has been indispensable to the progress made with 3D printed sports helmets, depending on the model, helmets with foam add-ons can reduce concussion risk anywhere from 15 to 34 percent. The NFL says that 97 percent of players now use custom-fit helmets.
Further, the initial success with helmets has pushed researchers to explore other opportunities for using 3D printing in football protective equipment. Concussions are one issue, but CTE occurs due to persistent sub-concussive head trauma. Working with researchers at Stanford, the company Certor Sports, maker of helmet brands including VICIS (a customer of 3D printer OEMs including Carbon), has leveraged AM to develop a chinstrap, the SoftShox, which may reduce impact intensity by up to 35 percent. There are also custom 3D printed mouth guards, which, like the technology involved in helmet liners, are relevant to many sports other than football, as well. Finally, focusing again solely on football, thigh pads, shoulder pads, etc., are all being 3D printed, and the NFL has signaled that masks are the next area of focus, launching a challenge for innovators earlier this year similar to the one that helped catalyze all the progress in liners.
The percentages I’ve cited help put the progress in perspective, but it’s just as striking to consider the subjective assessments from those working in the trenches of athletic safety:
Back in February, biomedical engineer Steve Rowson, director of the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab, told Science, “We’ve seen more change in roughly the last 14 years than we probably did in the previous 40,” and it’s important to keep in mind that, when Rowson speaks of the previous 40, he’s talking about an era whose starting point was a helmet design that hadn’t changed between 1939 and 1976.
Meanwhile, Jeff Crandall, a biomechanical engineer who works for helmet manufacturer Biocore, put it like this: “What was a top [helmet] in 2015 is now not even allowed on the field.”
And, as Rowson pointed out, “If you look at what we’re doing with helmets, it’s a straight analogy out of automotive safety.”
While there’s still much work to be done, that is, if anything, a cause for hope, because it means the worlds of football, sports science, and 3D printing have only begun to demonstrate their potential to reduce harm and risk for athletes. If the early generations entailed in transforming a single element of the helmet can make that much of a difference, who knows what the results could ultimately be if all padding is custom-fitted along the same lines, and researchers have had successive generations of feedback enabling them to refine their approach?
With that in mind, Steven Broglio, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, aptly pointed out in the same Science article quoted above, referring to the Virginia Tech Helmet Ratings, “Everybody wants to be at the top of the list, so they are becoming more and more innovative.” The very fact that we’re even now able to rate the safety of football helmets, and that this is becoming the primary differentiator in the market, will push innovation further in that direction. The fact that researchers can see the impact of hits down to individual lattices provides data that creates opportunities for further progress.
All that is good for business, but the importance of football in particular, and sports in general, makes it good, too, for far more meaningful reasons. Sports are like the last refuge for whatever remains in our society of collective goodwill. Two moments this year felt like Americans forgot how much we all hate each other: Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance and the Knicks winning the NBA championship. Humans have always needed sports, and we need them now more than ever.
Whatever can be done to make athletes focus on performance rather than injury risk is nothing less than a cultural imperative. And yes, even if you don’t care about such lofty abstractions, I think there is a great deal of money to be made out of it.
Featured image courtesy of Carbon