Another Look At Soft Shell Helmets

A while back, I wrote a quick item wondering about the possibility of soft shelled helmets replacing hard shelled helmets. Mainly, I was just wondering aloud about it and also the possibility of a combined shoulder-pad helmet design. The ideas being either:

1. A better dampening effect on the energy transmission to the head via the soft shelled helmet, or

2. A means of transferring the energy to the body so the head doesn’t take all of the energy from the blow via the combined helmet-shoulder pad design.

After all this time, I got a comment to that post which was basically a form of spamming; however, it was actually on topic to the post so I allowed the comment to remain. I’ll even to the commenter a favor by posting the website he provided right here: Game Breaker Helmets.

One of the arguments often heard about reining in head injuries is to remove the helmets from the game altogether. It’s a nice counter argument, but there have been studies done comparing incidents of head injuries between rugby players and football players and the results are a head-shot (yes, bad pun) to the counter argument: rugby players have a higher rate of concussion incidents than football players. So no helmets is not the answer.

So for hee-hee-ha-ha’s , I did a little research about the transition from leather helmets to hard shell helmets. In a, uh, nutshell, it was basically arbitrary. A guy by the name of John Riddell started making them in the 40’s because the leather helmets got soaked and brittle and generally not liked much. The hard-shell design allowed for team advertising with logo’s to boot. Football has been using the same basic design ever since.

I have no doubt that directly comparing soft shell helmets to hard shell helmets in controlled lab experiments would leave soft shell helmets wanting. But, I think actual use could achieve an important side-effect: modifying the way the game is played. Players would not be able to lead with the head as they do now, thereby reducing head and neck injuries in the long run. Plus, according to the link site I linked above, the helmets can be screened with team logos, so we don’t have to lose our fancy helmet artwork.

What would be nice is to see some kind of research about these soft shell helmets so that a more compelling case can be made for them. (Perhaps our commenter from above has something like that?) Of course, it might cut against them as well, but if the decision to use hard shell helmets way back when was arbitrary, then it can’t hurt to give the alternative a look and have the discussion now.