Eliminating Kickoffs Will Make College Football Safer, But Not Safe

As youth football participation rates plummet and athletic governing bodies are being held (somewhat) more responsible for the effect the sport has on players' health, sports organizations are making changes that they hope can make football safer and curb the criticism directed at the game.

Most of the changes have been small, such as rules banning helmet-to-helmet contact and mandating an ejection for "leading with the head." Earlier this year, the Ivy League banned in-season full-contact practices. But the National Collegiate Athletic Association could be about to take the biggest step yet, altering a major part of the game: according to CBS Sports, the association is considering eliminating kickoffs in college football.

"I don't think there is any doubt it is the most dangerous play in the game," Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, chairman of (the Division I) oversight committee, told CBS. "How much that's the case and how we can fix it is unknown."

There is little debate that kickoffs are extremely dangerous. They involve massive human beings accelerating to full speed and running into each other with as much force as possible. The hit that paralyzed former Rutgers player Eric LeGrand came on a kickoff. Indeed, when the NFL moved kickoffs up to increase touchbacks—that is, non-returnable kickoffs—its official, reported concussion totals decreased.

VICE Sports listed eliminating kickoffs as a potential way to make football safer last year. Doing so would decrease the number of hits athletes take—not just during games, but also during the offseason and season, as high-speed kickoff drills take place during almost every college football practice.

Eliminating kickoffs would be a step in the right direction toward protecting players, and likely less disruptive than it seems at first glance. For one, kickoffs arguably are the least necessary part of football; moreover, 39 percent of kickoffs throughout the college game last year didn't feature a return. In fact, the biggest stumbling block may be this: unlike outlawing big, obvious head-hunting hits that only happen occasionally, eliminating kickoffs would completely change a venerable aspect of the sport, which in turn would strongly suggest that football itself is inherently unsafe.

Given the NCAA's galling assertion that it has no "legal duty" to protect athletes, kickoff talk is a welcome surprise. It's good that college football's leaders want to do something—or, at the very least, sound like they're doing something—that would make a real safety difference. Whatever they ultimately decide, two questions will persist:

● Is the sport just throwing darts at the wall until the current balloon of brain trauma concern pops?

● In the long run, what, if anything, will be enough to make football acceptably safe for a group of players who are also students, and (theoretically) on campus first and foremost to have their brains nurtured and protected by the same institutions whose logos they wear on their helmets?

Relative to previous rules tweaks, eliminating kickoffs would be a giant step.

What could be next? Some, including John Madden, have discussed eliminating the three-point stance—the stance in which linemen crouch with one hand on the ground—which is used by players at the line of scrimmage to launch themselves into opponents on every snap, usually accompanied by head contact. This isn't a fringe idea—it has been endorsed by Dr. Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon and medical director of Pop Warner youth football, and even NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has said it could happen.

"I advocated to the NFL several years ago that they should take linemen out of the three-point stance," Bailes told VICE Sports. "We had several former NFL linemen that did not have a concussion that were diagnosed with CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a neurodegenerative disease associated with repetitive brain trauma)."

After that, the options get more drastic. Research has found that getting rid of helmets could potentially reduce concussions, as players would be more likely to avoid head-to-head contact. However, that would dramatically increase the odds of players sustaining catastrophic and/or fatal skull fractures; on the non-medical front, it would make the game look more like rugby than what we see today. Another suggested option is for referees to monitor sensors on helmets that measure the force at which any player uses his head as a weapon, an iffy solution that presupposes sensors can be designed to distinguish hit intent—is a player really headhunting, or just ducking at the wrong moment?—and also fails to acknowledge that there is no force threshold for concussions.

Of course, the biggest change could just be eliminating games and shortening seasons, lessening exposure to hits all together. And that gets at football's underlying problem: the only surefire way to prevent and reduce brain trauma is to play less of the sport as we currently know it.

This is the correct, commonsense approach. But it also means cutting back, or even giving up, something we love, all while making less money in the process. And those, in turn, are powerful incentives to maintain the status quo.

There is so much we don't know about the true risks of the sport. We don't yet know which hits lead to worse health effects down the line, and we don't know how many hits are too many, or if there is even a magic number. We do know that athletes who play a lot of football—and take a lot of hits to the head—face a greater risk of suffering traumatic brain injuries in the short term, and lasting damage in the long term, than they would if they ran track or played tennis.

"The problem is that the very nature of the way the game is played currently results in an extensive exposure to subconcussive blows," Boston University neurologist Dr. Robert Stern previously told VICE Sports.

Banning kickoffs is a start. But it's not the end-all, be-all solution. More change is inevitably coming. Because if we don't know what amount of hitting is safe, or at least safe enough, then who can say with any real confidence that the latest rule tweak means the sport's problems are solved? For now, the way forward seems to point in one direction, and it isn't a path that anyone involved in the game is particularly keen to follow: if you want to protect brains, play as little football as possible.

Want to read more stories like this from VICE Sports? Subscribe to our daily newsletter.