No helmets in American football - level 3
The NFL could be set to ban helmets. The chairman of the National Football League’s Health and Safety Advisory Commission thinks American football could ban helmets in the future, as experts say they give players a false sense of security.
The company has tried to reduce the risk of head injuries over the last five years and recently reached an almost one billion dollar legal settlement with ex-players suffering from head trauma, depression, memory loss, and mood swings.
Banning helmets has been raised by some doctors and ex-players in recent years, without really ever being taken seriously.
The idea is to take away helmets so the human head can’t be used as a weapon. If players didn’t wear helmets, they wouldn’t be able to play in a three-point stance and they wouldn’t be able to use their heads as projectiles for launching into the opposition.
And while that would probably help solve the NFL’s concussion problem, some suggest there would be inevitably incidental collisions, where fracturing the skull or the face is a realistic concern.
There’s no telling if this is something the NFL as a whole would actually consider, but if it were to go ahead, it would mean an entire rethink of the fundamental aspects of the game.
Difficult words: a false sense of security (when you think that you are safe when you are not safe), legal settlement (when the law says that you must pay money for something you did wrong), trauma (an injury), three-point stance (when you stand low to the ground with one hand on the ground and one hand by your leg), projectile (a thing to hit people with), launch (to run into), concussion (when you hit your head very hard and it hurts your brain), inevitable (something that will happen), incidental (when something happens with something else), fracture (break), fundamental (important).