ArticleBMJ open sport & exercise medicine2025
Distribution of position-specific head impact severities among professional and Division I collegiate American football athletes during games.
Article in BMJ open sport & exercise medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Head impact biomechanics across men's and women's contact sports: a comparative and clustering analysis.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Head Impact Exposure Across Levels of Play in American Football: A Systematic Review of Accelerometer Data.Neurotrauma reportsReview
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Authors and funding
19 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Objective: To compare the severity of head impacts between professional and Division I (D-I) collegiate football games for the purpose of improving protective equipment. Methods: A total of 243 football players from the National Football League (NFL) and from D-I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) were equipped with instrumented mouthpieces capable of measuring six degrees-of-freedom head kinematics. Head impacts were processed using a custom algorithm and combined with game period descriptors to produce a curated dataset for analysis. Head impact severity distributions for several kinematic-based metrics were compared within position groupings between leagues. Results: A total of 11 038 head impacts greater than 10 g from 1208 player-games were collected during 286 player-seasons (2019-2022). No significant differences were found between leagues in the distributions of kinematic-based metrics for all investigated position groupings (p≥0.320). The median and IQRs for peak linear acceleration for NFL and NCAA were 17.2 (9.3) g and 17.0 (8.6) g for linemen, 20.7 (13.8) g and 20.0 (13.5) g for hybrid and 21.0 (17.0) g and 20.8 (15.5) g for speed position groupings, respectively. Conclusion: The absence of statistically significant differences in the distributions of head impact severity between professional and D-I collegiate football players indicates that these data can be combined for the purpose of understanding the range of loading conditions for which new protective equipment, such as position-specific helmets, should be designed. This observation underscores the potential for knowledge transfer regarding biomechanical factors affecting head loading across professional and D-I college football, highlighting crucial implications for innovation in protective equipment.
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