A new study presented at the American Academy of Neurology Sports Concussion Conference yesterday found that the frequency and force of impacts was lower with rugby-style tackling compared to football tackling. At first glance, this like a great thing, given that rugby-style, heads-up, lead with the shoulder tackling is being taught more commonly in football today. But what do the findings of this research really mean for the safety of heads-up tackling in American football? Not much.
The study compared hits happening in athletes playing rugby to hits happening in athletes playing football. This is an important point that isn’t made clear in the reporting on the study. Rugby and football have similarities, but they are different games.
Rugby players don’t wear helmets or pads, so the big collisions hurt more than they do in a fully-padded football player. They also can’t use their helmet as a weapon, since they aren’t wearing one. For these reasons, some people have suggested that safety in football would be improved if the athletes didn’t wear this protective equipment.
The findings of this study do support the idea that rugby-style tackling without helmets and padding while playing rugby results in fewer hits and hits of a lower force than tackling while playing football.
The study does not, however, say anything about the effect of using heads-up tackling in football. Researchers would need to examine the hits in football players taught traditional tackling techniques compared to football players taught the rugby-style tackling technique in order to determine if the rugby-style tackling actually making a meaningful difference in football head impacts. It’s possible that the padded and helmeted football players still hit hard, even if they are using this “safer” technique.
One other issue of concern is the use of mouth guard impact sensors used to measure the number and force of the impacts in this study. Though the technology has improved, the accuracy of these types of sensors have been questioned in the past. According to the study, the rugby players had an average impact of 21g (linear acceleration, or acceleration in one, straight-line direction, measured as g-force). The football players experienced impacts with an average of 63g. This is way higher than findings from most other studies of head impacts in football, where the average tends to be between 19-25g. It seems odd that the average force of impact in football players is so high in this study.
While teaching rugby-style tackling in football is likely an improvement on the status quo, we don’t yet know if it results in meaningful differences in head impacts in the sport. Other research presented at the AAN Sport Concussion Conference showed that teaching tackling without helmets in practice led to a decrease in head impacts in games early in the season. However, by the end of the season the football players experienced the same number of head impacts in games as those who practiced with helmets.
Although the findings of this study on tackling techniques are intriguing, we need more research to understand whether or not rugby-style tackling has a positive effect on the number and force of impacts in American football, and, ultimately, the safety of the game.