The first quarterback-specific helmet designed to help reduce the risk of concussions has been approved for use by the NFL and NFLPA.
According to the Associated Press, the helmet, which Vicis created, lessens the impact of helmet-to-ground collisions, which league data says accounts for almost half of all quarterback-sustained concussions. Fans of the sport may remember the scary moment when Miami Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa
was rendered unconscious after his head slammed into the turf during a game against Cincinnati. “We’ve now analyzed with our engineers and with the Players Association more than a 1,000 concussions on field, we have a pretty good database of how these injuries occur,” NFL executive Jeff Miller said. “This helmet performs better in laboratory testing than any helmets we have ever seen for those sorts of impacts.”The Vicis helmet performed 7% better than the most popular headgear worn by quarterbacks last season, the league said in a memo sent to team executives on Thursday. It’s still in early discussions as an executive for the company said that they only began designing the Zero2 Matrix QB helmet last year. “The unique thing is that it has a deformal outer shell, which means when you take an impact in any location on that helmet, it will deform or basically dent in that location to absorb the impact,” Vicis executive Jason Neubauer
said. “What that means for us, as designers or engineers, as we’re looking to optimize it for different types of impacts, we’re able to change unique locations to try to optimize the impact mitigation in any one area.”The NFL and the player’s union are responsible for sharing data with teams and their players so that quarterbacks can make informed decisions about which helmet they’ll use in the coming seasons. The only other positions that can use the Zero2 Matrix design are offensive and defensive linemen.
Hopefully, this is the first step of many to protect the health of football players.