College soccer players suffered far more concussions during training than during games, medical researchers reported Monday, a finding that will certainly add to the years-long debate about regulating exercise regimens in sports.
Much less clear is whether the college sports industry will nationalize security reforms, such as that of the NFL, which limits the number of full-contact practices per season, or some college conferences. But with the NCAA and its members facing urgent decisions on other fronts, including the coronavirus pandemic, far-reaching new rules are unlikely to be forthcoming.
The authors of the new study, published in JAMA Neurology, a peer-reviewed journal, found that 72 percent of the concussions they assessed over five college football seasons occurred during practice. And while the preseason training accounted for about a fifth of the time the researchers studied, they found that nearly half of the concussions occurred during that period.
Changes to the rules of the game, they wrote, “are an important part of protecting athletes during competitions,” but they claimed that revisions to training activities before and during the season “could lead to a significant reduction” in concussions.
“The biggest surprise was the size of the data, not just the trend of the data,” says Dr. Michael A. McCrea, lead author of the study and professor of neurosurgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where he is co-director. of the Center for Neurotrauma Research.
“Most people, scientists or not, are aware that there is more full-contact activity in the preseason than in the regular season, so I’m not sure the trend of that finding is any surprise,” he continued. “But maybe the size of it.”
In an editorial also published in JAMA Neurology Monday, two other brain injury experts described the study’s findings as “ shocking, ” especially given the concussion and head exposure statistics, known as HIE, during contractually regulated practices in the NFL.
Professional teams are not allowed to hold more than 14 padded practices during the regular season. In the 2019 NFL regular season, less than 7 percent of concussions occurred during practice, according to league data.
“Concussions in games are inevitable, but concussions in practice are preventable,” the experts, Dr. Robert C. Cantu and Christopher J. Nowinski, who were not authors of the McCrea-led study, wrote in their editorial. “Practices are controlled situations where coaches have almost complete control over the HIE risks that players take.”
Even when they acknowledged that the NCAA had made recommendations and pushed for wider changes, they sharply noted that “ guidelines are not rules. ”
The NCAA, which takes its authority from its member schools, did not immediately comment on Monday.
In a speech in January, Mark Emmert, the president of the NCAA, said the association had made “ tremendous progress on concussion protocols, ” perhaps a reference to a 2015 mandate that every school in a Power 5 conference submits its concussion guidelines annually for review. by a national commission. (That procedure was abandoned during the coronavirus pandemic.)
Speaking at the NCAA convention, Emmert unequivocally urged to add “some teeth to our health and safety protocols” and said there should be a system that “holds each other accountable for the commitments we make to to promote and advocate and implement protocols. “
But the NCAA’s legislative process is grueling, and few sports companies are as vast and disjointed as Division I college football. While the NCAA sets practice time and enforces rules around things like transfers and recruitment, the conferences that play football within Division I have tremendous daily power and set policies that can vary from one league to another.
For example, in 2016, the Ivy League – which plays in the football championship subdivision, and not the football bowl subdivision that attracts the most money and attention – banned full-contact hits during all regular season practice sessions. The rule stands alone, the editorial noted, nearly five years later.
The NCAA itself has often adhered to what it describes as “recommendations” to combat concussion risks, including that exercising three days a week during the regular season should involve minimal or no contact. The NCAA’s approach, the study authors said, “has had a limited effect in reducing the incidence of preseason concussions.”
The findings published Monday were a long time in the making. In the study, conducted at six Division I schools participating in a research consortium partially funded by the NCAA and the Pentagon, 658 footballers wore helmets equipped with accelerometers.
At the end of the 2019 season, when the investigation was completed after recording more than 528,000 head strikes over five seasons, 68 of the controlled players had suffered concussions. The researchers tracked players at Air Force, Army, North Carolina, UCLA, Virginia Tech and Wisconsin. Jumping practices were not included, McCrea said.
Crucially, researchers have found variations in the head’s exposure to collisions between individual players, even among teammates playing the same position, McCrea said.
“Certain teams practice differently from other teams, and certain players play differently from other players,” McCrea said.
Aside from any overarching strategies that could emerge, he said, athletes should make more local efforts to try and reduce risk.
“There is a shared responsibility here: for the scientists providing the evidence, for policymakers, for institutions and coaches and players,” he said. “I think we all have a responsibility.”