The Problem With Football Helmets

Roman Mars (0:01)

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In August 2024, James Daniels was suiting up for an NFL preseason game. Daniels was an offensive lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and he was signed to a lucrative three-year contract to play with the team.

Chris Berube (0:20)

But that day, nobody was talking about Daniels as a player. The news media was focused on Daniels because of what he was wearing.

Roman Mars (0:28)

That's producer Chris Berube.

Chris Berube (0:30)

Daniels was believed to be the first NFL player to sport a new kind of helmet during a game, an awkward piece of equipment called a guardian cap.

Roman Mars (0:40)

A guardian cap is basically an extra layer of padding that goes around the outside of a traditional football helmet.

Noah Cohan (0:47)

So you've got your helmet, and then you've got your guardian cap, and then you've got another layer that you pull down over the guardian cap that then represents the logos of the team, the Chargers lightning bolts or the Green Bay G or whatever it may be.

Chris Berube (0:57)

Noah Cohan is a professor of American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and he's the author of an upcoming book about football helmets. He says the guardian cap looks markedly different from what football fans are used to.

Noah Cohan (1:13)

It sort of looks like if you had soundproof padding in the form of a cap and stretch that over your helmet. It's a series of lumps made of foam within a sort of fabric covering that's then clipped to the outside of the helmet.

Roman Mars (1:31)

The guardian cap is meant to absorb the impact of headshots and to protect players' brains from concussions. Some people hailed the caps as a big step for player safety.

Chris Berube (1:42)

Today, most NFL players are required to wear them during practices, and some players even wear them during NFL games. But since their introduction, players wearing the guardian caps have received a ton of mockery.

The caps make players' helmets look bulbous and disproportionate to the rest of their body. They make professional athletes look like human bobbleheads.

Noah Cohan (2:05)

Your head is huge. You look like the Great Gazoo. It's very noticeable.

Roman Mars (2:12)

It's not just the fans who take issue with guardian caps. Many players complain about sacrificing swagger for safety. Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelce actually made fun of the whole idea of a guardian cap during a practice, by covering his head in bubble wrap. Other players have said they have no plans to wear them during games.

Chris Berube (2:33)

Like former Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tungo-Viloa, who suffered multiple concussions, here he is in a press conference in 2024 Will you wear a guardian cap?

George Visker (2:42)

Nope. Why?

Chris Berube (2:45)

Personal choice.

Most players will agree that, yes, it is a good thing to develop new football helmets that make the game safer, but they aren't embracing the guardian cap. In fact, pretty much every evolution of the football helmet has received a mixed response from players and fans. Football helmets have been a flashpoint between folks who want to make football safer and those who want to keep the game rough and tumble. It's been at the center of moral panics and court cases, and today, it's part of a bigger discussion about whether or not it's responsible or even ethical to keep playing America's most popular sport.

Roman Mars (3:26)

It may be hard to believe, but there was a time before football was America's game. Way back in the 1870s, football was mostly a distraction for rowdy college students.

Noah Cohan (3:38)

The very first sort of intercollegiate organized match between Rutgers and Princeton, I believe, is more like a soccer match than what we understand today as American football.

Chris Berube (3:50)

Ivy League college students started mixing soccer and rugby to make up a new kind of American super sport.

Originally, American football had a lot of, you know, using your feet to kick the ball forward. But that changed after a fateful game between Harvard University and some good old Canadians from McGill University in Montreal.

Roman Mars (4:12)

Like most new sports, there was a certain fluidity to the rules and style of play.

Harvard was used to a version of football, with a lot of kicking, while McGill was still playing a version of rugby, where the ball was passed around by hand. So the Canadians saw what Harvard was doing and said, hey, why are you kicking that ball? You absolute losers.

Noah Cohan (4:34)

And McGill says, you shouldn't play that kicking game. What you want to play is this rugby game where you carry the ball.