Mac, did you even read the article??
fate..Yes I do and did...how bout you?...do you read..?NFL Accused of Quashing Concussion-Preventing Helmets | Newsmax.com
Monday, 18 March 2013 12:05 PM EDT
linkWith a device called ProCap, Bert Straus says he invented headgear that could reduce concussions in National Football League games. He never got the chance.
The ProCap, which took him eight years to develop, was gaining ground among players until he brought it before the NFL committee dealing with brain injuries. The panel disparaged Straus’s invention, prompting the league to warn players they risked death wearing it. The committee was guided in part by the advice of an outside consultant who once testified for Riddell Inc. (0059072D), the league’s official helmet maker, in an injury lawsuit.
Now the NFL and Riddell face lawsuits filed by more than 4,000 ex-players, including the family of San Diego Chargers standout Junior Seau, who committed suicide last May. The litigation focuses attention on Riddell’s helmets and whether the league covered up the sport’s long-term damage to players’ brains.
In Straus’s account of frustration and failure -- exacerbated, he says, by the NFL’s relationship with Riddell -- is a tale of a road that the NFL, a $9 billion-a-year business, may rue not taking. His story isn’t the only example of the NFL spurning a Riddell competitor. The league’s rebuffs of ProCap and other protective headgear raise the question of whether the NFL’s quarter-century alliance with Riddell helped stifle competition and innovation that might have reduced head injuries.
Helmet Hostility
“Riddell was hostile toward ProCap, because ProCap pointed up the limitations of its helmets, and the NFL was biased toward Riddell,” Straus, 76, said in an interview. “That unfortunately counted for more than the welfare of the players.”
While about 68 percent of NFL players wore Riddell helmets last year, Riddell’s competitors “have always had (and continue to have) the same access to NFL locker rooms” as it does, the company said in a statement.
“Riddell’s primary mission has always been, and continues to be, providing the best protective football headgear to the athlete,” it said. “Riddell has produced state-of-the-art, industry-leading helmets for the athlete, and at the same time, Riddell has disseminated valuable knowledge to the helmet manufacturing industry” and “the independent helmet research community.”
Straus’s Story
Straus’s story begins in 1987, when the Erie, Pennsylvania, industrial designer was watching a college football game on TV. He winced when he saw two players go sprawling after a helmet-to-helmet collision. The crash jarred loose an idea: design a pillow-like buffer to fit over conventional helmets to cushion such blows.
Two years of tinkering produced the ProCap, a half-inch- thick urethane foam mold that would be worn atop conventional football helmets. Straus attached a prototype to a helmet and in 1989 had it tested at Wayne State University’s impact research lab. The results were encouraging. Dummy heads inside ProCap- wrapped helmets took 30 percent less of a jolt, on average, than those in unadorned ones.
Straus’s timing seemed propitious. Concussion concerns had begun to circulate among NFL players, coaches and executives. Straus sent ProCaps to the Buffalo Bills, the NFL franchise nearest to him. Intrigued, Bills trainer Ed Abramoski told Mark Kelso, a free safety who had just suffered his fourth concussion, that he wouldn’t be cleared to play in the next game unless he wore a ProCap, both men said.
‘Bubblehead, Gazoo’
Kelso did so and intercepted a pass against the Los Angeles Rams. He donned the device for the rest of a career that lasted until 1993 and included four Super Bowl appearances.
“It prolonged my career for years,” Kelso said. “I took a lot of kidding -- getting called ‘Bubblehead’ and ‘Gazoo’ -- because of how it looked, but I stopped getting concussions.”
ProCap gained other NFL converts, among them San Francisco 49ers lineman Steve Wallace. A 1992 All-Pro and the first offensive lineman to fetch a $10 million contract, Wallace was credited in Michael Lewis’s book, “The Blind Side,” with helping to boost the value of left tackles, who protect unwary quarterbacks from pass rushers.
After suffering three concussions in the first half of the 1994 season, Wallace concluded his Riddell helmet wasn’t giving him enough protection and began wearing a ProCap. He incurred no more concussions and won his third Super Bowl ring. A number of variables can affect concussion rates, including playing style and plain old luck. Still, from his place in the trenches, Wallace became a believer.
Technology There
“The technology was there for ProCap,” Wallace said in an interview. “It was working.”
Kelso said he felt so strongly about ProCap that he invested in the product, joining a group assembled by Straus that pooled $200,000 to form a company, Protective Sports Equipment, and crank up production of ProCaps. Some of Kelso’s teammates, including receiver Don Beebe, began wearing ProCaps, as did a smattering of players on other teams. College football programs, including Alabama and Washington State, started ordering ProCaps, as did a rising number of high schools.
An independent 1995 study by George Washington University’s sports medicine department looked at data from the St. Albans School in Washington, where half the team wore ProCap. It found no concussions among users -- yet six among those who didn’t attach ProCaps to their helmets.
‘Clear Findings’
“It’s unusual to have such clear findings in a small group,” said Kenneth Fine, an orthopedic surgeon who co-ran the study. “We didn’t find ProCap created a danger of neck injuries; we found it reduced cervical strain.”
Straus thought he was on the cusp of a breakthrough when he was invited the same year to make a presentation on ProCap to a concussion study panel, formally known as the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, which the NFL’s then-commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, formed in 1994. It turned out he wasn’t.
Since 1989, the NFL had developed a deepening commercial relationship with Riddell, a Rosemont, Illinois-based athletic gear maker whose founder, John Tate Riddell, invented the plastic suspension helmet, adopted first by the U.S. military, in 1939. By the time Straus came before the concussion committee, Riddell helmets donned about 80 percent of NFL player heads, according to a company filing.
Not Experts
When Straus addressed the NFL’s concussion committee about ProCap in 1995, not all its members were head injury experts. Chairman Elliot Pellman, team doctor for the New York Jets, was a rheumatologist; Joseph Waeckerle, physician for the Kansas City Chiefs, was an emergency medicine specialist.
They relied for scientific advice on non-football experts, one of whom was a consultant to the committee named Albert Burstein. This Cornell Medical College biomechanics professor had served as an expert witness for Riddell in a federal court case in Wichita, Kansas, in which a paralyzed high-school football player was awarded $12 million.
At the end of the presentation, according to Straus, Burstein asked if ProCap had been tested for “axial loading,” compression of the neck and spine by a blow to the top of the head. He expressed concern that in a collision of two helmets, one with ProCap and one without, the hard helmet would stick to the ProCap’s softer surface long enough to cause axial loading.
Straus pledged to test for the phenomenon and did, his company paying Pennsylvania State University Biomechanics Laboratory to conduct studies on dummy heads with and without ProCaps. The conclusion: ProCap reduced impacts of collisions by as much as a third.
“It is my opinion that the ProCap should be mandatory for all football players,” Richard Nelson, the lab’s founder, wrote in a report to Straus.
Different Interpretation
Yet when Straus sent the findings to the concussion committee, the panel startled him with a different interpretation. Burstein wasn’t changing his hypothesis, according to Pellman. The Penn State results confirmed “our greatest concern regarding axial loading and catastrophic neck injuries,” Pellman wrote in a December 1995 letter to Tagliabue.
Nelson was a big name -- founding editor of the International Journal of Sports Biomechanics -- and he strenuously disagreed with Burstein, whose primary field was prosthetics.
“It is incredible that such a conclusion can be drawn when, in fact, the results show the exact opposite,” Nelson wrote at the time.
Warranty Negated
Even worse, in Straus’s view, the league in June 1996 sent players a memo warning not only that the “standard helmet manufacturer’s warranty may be negated or modified by the use of the ProCap,” but that wearers risked “catastrophic neck injuries, including possible death.”
Wallace, for one, recalls getting the message. When he played his final season for the Kansas City Chiefs in 1997, the team forbade him from wearing the ProCap, he said. Waeckerle, then the Chiefs’ physician, was a member of the concussion committee. He couldn’t be reached for comment.
Riddell salesmen gave copies to dealers in youth sports equipment and ProCap college customers, Straus said. He wrote to the NFL office, accusing Riddell of disseminating a confidential league memo. A league official wrote back, disputing the claim, Straus said.
Asked why it discouraged use of ProCap, Riddell said in a statement that “we recommend against any alterations that change the fit, form or function of our helmets.” Greg Aiello, an NFL spokesman, declined to comment, saying league officials aren’t “interested in looking backward.” Burstein declined to comment, saying his work for the committee was confidential.
Headgear Derailed
The ProCap wasn’t the only non-Riddell headgear that the concussion committee derailed. In 1999, Bike Athletic Co. introduced the Bike Pro Edition helmet, endorsed by the NFL Players Association’s then-president Trace Armstrong. A Miami Dolphins defensive lineman and amateur auto racer, Armstrong had noticed that drivers’ helmets were often upgraded with new technology while football helmets hadn’t changed in decades.
He collaborated with a Bike designer on the Pro Edition, which was lighter and more flexible than earlier helmets. The theory, endorsed by several physicians, was that the reduced weight would make players less fatigued and susceptible to injuries, said Ed Christman, a former Bike marketing executive.
In 2000, as the number of NFL players wearing the Bike Pro Edition climbed to about 100, Pellman, the concussion committee chairman, stated publicly that the helmet failed to withstand hits administered by Biokinetics and Associates Ltd., a Canadian impact-testing company. Pellman’s New York Jets players predominantly wore Riddell. Use of the Bike helmet dwindled.
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