Photos from Day One of Bills Rookie Minicamp

True the materials in the helmets help to prevent concussions in hockey a lot more then in football. I’m honestly not sure how tey work, but I read that they are simular to the hockey ones. Not sure if they’ll be effective or not though.

the racing helmets are using multiple layers of varying density materials. the idea is to provide more controlled de-celeration of the skull. improving football helmet safety should be easy when compared to a 200 m.p.h. race car (or 300+ in the case of top fuel/funny cars).

Just so you dont think i’m full of it, I have a BS in Mechanical Engineering.

The Helmets, as I know of, are designed kind of like car bumpers. The helmet aborbs the impact with out actually the head impacting the helmet.
Think of the padding as a “crumple zone”. It absorbs the impact with the padding and not the head. Therefore the helmet actually works a limited number of times. Another good example is the water or sand filled drums used on Highway baracads. The drums absorb the force of the impact and take most of the damage while your car doesnt become an accordion.

NY State, NJ and several others have mandated them for HS football and per the article noted below by UPMC and exceprt quoted here, they saw over three year of just this initial study: “The annual concussion rate was 5.4 percent annual percent rate in athletes wearing the Revolution helmet, compared to a 7.6 annual percent rate in athletes wearing standard helmets, representing a 2.3 percent decreased absolute risk of concussion for high school football players. In terms of relative risk, Revolution wearers were 31 percent less likely to sustain a concussion compared to athletes who wore standard football helmets.” I highlighted the numbers for those disinclined to read the whole thing.

Now, those may seem like small numbers, but when you have states like NY where thousands of kids play football in grades 7-12, those numbers make a huge impact in the rate and severity of concussions. Also, another thing to factor into the situation is that currently there are MORE people on the look out for concussions from coaches, to doctors to family members, and with the use of the Revo and other brands versions of it, any reduction seen in concussions is a good thing.

For info on how said helmets work, please check this Wired article here and here is what Riddell has to say about their Revo helmets and last but not least here is an actual study conducted by UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) that shows a significant decrease in concussions between users using a Revo vs. standard helmets, read it here