Study Finds Concussions Occur In College Football Practice More Than In Regular Season Games

On Monday, a medical report revealed that college football players have sustained more concussions during practice than in games.

The report comes from a study that was conducted and has been peer-reviewed. The authors of the study found that 72% of the concussions they reviewed in over five college football seasons occurred during practice. During the study, preseason training only accounted for one-fifth of the time researchers studied. However, nearly half of the concussions occurred during the preseason.

The study was conducted at six Division one schools that participate in a research consortium that was partly funded by the NCAA and the Pentagon. 658 football players in the study wore helmets outfitted with accelerometers. The study lasted for about five seasons. Spring practices were not tracked.

The study concluded at the end of the 2019 season. The study recorded a whopping 528,000 head impacts across the five seasons. 68 of the monitored players sustained concussions. Of the 658 football players tracked, the players were from Air Force, North Carolina, UCLA, Virginia Tech, and Wisconsin.

Dr. Michael A. McCrea, the lead author of the study, remarked, “The biggest surprise was the extent of the data, not just the trend of the data.” McCrea is a neurosurgery professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He is currently the co-director of the Center for Neurotrauma Research. McCrea was not surprised about the research findings but is said to be surprised by, “maybe the magnitude of it.”

Two other brain injury experts described the study’s results as “shocking.” Especially, the given statistics about concussions and head impact exposure, known as H.I.E., during regulated practices in the NFL.

NFL teams cannot hold more than 14 padded practices during the regular season. The NFL’s league data found that during the 2019 regular season, less than 7% of concussions happened during practices.

Other experts such as Dr. Robert C. Cantu and Christopher J. Nowinski, who were not part of the McCrea study, wrote in their editorial, “Concussions in games are inevitable, but concussions in practice are preventable.”  The two experts went further and wrote that, “Practices are controlled situations where coaches have almost complete authority over the H.I.E. risks taken by players.” Cantu and Nowinski went further to argue, “Concussions in games are inevitable, but concussions in practice are preventable.”

The results bring more evidence to the current debate about the risks of concussion in football. The current arguments are that there must be more regulated rules in order to prevent concussions in the sport. However, it is often difficult to do so because of different rules and leagues. As the study found, it also has to do with the ways players and teams play.

Division one college football is a good example because it is disjointed and sprawled out. This is different from the NCAA which is the complete opposite of Division one football. The football conferences that play within have more power and have policies that differ from other leagues. In 2016, the Ivy league which plays in the Football Championship Subdivision banned full-contact hits during regular-season games. As of today, the rule still stands in effect.

Earlier in January, Mark Emmer, the NCAA’s president, said that the association, “made wonderful strides around concussion protocols.” This is a reference to their 2015 mandate that every school in the Power 5 conference annually submit its concussion guidelines for review by a national committee. In that same speech, Emmer spoke about how there should be a system that, “holds each other accountable for the commitments we make to promote and advocate and conduct those protocols.”

However, that could not be said for the NCAA as a whole because it does not enforce but rather suggests, “recommendations” to combat concussion risks. This includes a recommendation that three days of practice each week during the regular season should involve no or minimal contact. The current approach from the NCAA has “limited effect in reducing preseason concussion incidence,” said the study’s authors.

“There’s shared responsibility here: on the scientists who produce the evidence, on policymakers, on institutions and coaches and players,” said the study’s author about different ways to prevent risks of concussions in football. This comes back to one of the findings of the study said about how the impact differs from teams and players. “Certain teams practice different than other teams, and certain players play different than other players,” said McCrea on the different variances found.