EFFORTS TO REDUCE CONCUSSIONS IN NFL MAY BE BEARING FRUIT
Wider testing results in fewer diagnoses, which suggests league measures effective
Up, down. Up, down.
Concussion diagnoses dropped 24 per cent in the NFL in 2018, the league announced Thursday.
This, a year after the number rose 15 per cent. Which came a year after it dropped 12 per cent. Which came a year after it rose 33 per cent. Which came a year after it dropped 10 per cent. You get the idea.
The longer the NFL annually tracks traumatic brain injuries within each pre-season and regular season, between practice and games, the less any of us should draw any meaningful, big-picture conclusions from such numbers.
The NFL, to its credit, most years is careful not to.
The roller-coaster totals aren’t a result of a wavering earnestness, honesty or diligence in this joint mission between the league and the players’ union.
Rather, it’s that myriad important factors change annually, and substantially, thus rendering fruitless any attempts to draw scientific inferences within this 2012-18 time frame. These are not only apples-to-oranges comparisons, but apples-to-oranges comparisons where the brands of apples and oranges change yearly.
Let’s address the top-line 2018 season numbers the NFL released Thursday.
Whereas in 2017 a total of 281 pre-season and regular-season concussions were diagnosed — the most since the NFL and NFL Players Association jointly began keeping track and releasing such findings in 2012 — the number plummeted to 214 in 2018.
Concussions suffered in pre-season and regular-season practices were practically flat year-over-year (down four from 102 to 98).
Thus, the 2018 overall plummet is due almost entirely to concussion drops in games.
Year-over-year, concussions fell 26 per cent in pre-season games (from 46 to 34) and 28 per cent in regular-season games (from 224 to 161). The latter figure, 161, is the second lowest in that category in the seven years these figures have been tabulated.
A year ago at this time, some of the league’s leaders were so alarmed at the 15-per-cent year-over-year rise in concussion diagnoses, they launched a threepronged plan to get the numbers down. Surely those efforts played at least a small role in Thursday’s reported drops.
That said, it might well be impossible, and wrong, to draw sweeping conclusions from these tabulations. There is a pronounced sense of randomness to all of it.
For instance, players, their union leaders, league officials, coaches and team doctors have told me with certainty, albeit anecdotal certainty, that the number of players who voluntarily go up to their teammates, coaches or medical staff to admit they might have been concussed, has shot up in recent years.
Everyone involved with contact sports at any level this decade knows so much more now about the dangers of brain injuries than they did in 2010. Or even 2015.
So, shouldn’t the number of concussion diagnoses be going up, in concert? Undoubtedly.
On the other hand, those increases surely are being offset to whatever degree by all the NFL-NFLPA efforts to make their brand of pro football safer.
First, the league said Thursday that 41 per cent of players wore the safest brands of helmets in 2017, while 74 per cent did so this season. Conversely, those still wearing the helmets that test as least safe dropped from 27 per cent to two per cent. That percentage will drop to zero next year when all of the least-safe models are banned.
What’s more, every year the NFL passes a rule or three where the sole intent is to make the game safer. The elimination this decade of such things as various types of blindside blocks and helmet-to-helmet hits, plus the numerous tweaks and overhauls to football’s likeliest play that results in a concussion, the kickoff, surely have helped to reduce concussions. Same with the improved “eye in the sky” detection capability since it was introduced in 2015.
The league said Thursday this measure resulted in 12 play stoppages.
There are other changing factors, too. including how the league in 2017 adopted all of the concussion-diagnosis tests included in the latest version of the international Sport Concussion Assessment Tool (SCAT 5).
So, shouldn’t the NFL’s concussion diagnoses be going up? Undoubtedly. But to what degree?
Up, down, up, down, indeed. The NFL doesn’t even know.
Dr. Allen Sills, a renowned neurosurgeon from Tennessee about to begin his third year as the league’s chief medical officer, said Thursday that 75 per cent of concussion screenings in 2018 were negative. That suggests there were approximately 850 NFL concussion examinations conducted from the beginning of training camp through the final regular-season games on Dec. 30.
Commercial fishermen know if you throw out a bigger, better net, you’ll catch more fish. And this decade, no one can dispute that the NFL has been throwing out bigger, better nets using smarter techniques.
We should focus on that, not the size of the fish hauls each year.
JoKryk@postmedia.com Twitter.com/JohnKryk