AUDIO: CougCenter Podcast, Episode 39 - Arizona Wildcats Edition

if no one has helmets

After seeing him without pads, I realized just how small he is. The kid is 17 years old, 6’3 and about 170 pounds if he’s lucky. I hold my breath every time he may take contact.

We hope you found it intellectually stimulating on a purely irrelevant level.

Then every tackle would be one giant s’more.

While the big time hits usually happen between skill players, linemen take helmet hits multiple times every series.

From that piece, which is amazing:

When we think about football, we worry about the dangers posed by the heat and the fury of competition. Yet the HITS data suggest that practice—the routine part of the sport—can be as dangerous as the games themselves. We also tend to focus on the dramatic helmet-to-helmet hits that signal an aggressive and reckless style of play. Those kinds of hits can be policed. But what sidelined the U.N.C. player, the first time around, was an accidental and seemingly innocuous elbow, and none of the blows he suffered that day would have been flagged by a referee as illegal. Most important, though, is what Guskiewicz found when he reviewed all the data for the lineman on that first day in training camp. He didn’t just suffer those four big blows. He was hit in the head thirty-one times that day. What seems to have caused his concussion, in other words, was his cumulative exposure. And why was the second concussion—in the game at Utah—so much more serious than the first? It’s not because that hit to the side of the head was especially dramatic; it was that it came after the 76-g blow in warmup, which, in turn, followed the concussion in August, which was itself the consequence of the thirty prior hits that day, and the hits the day before that, and the day before that, and on and on, perhaps back to his high-school playing days.