Waiting on science our savior

As the evidence for traumatic brain injury connected to football forced its way into the sporting consciousness over the 1990s and 2000s, one of the occasional yet persistent responses to the concern was to insist that technology would eventually provide a solution that would preserve football in something like the form we have come to know. In most cases this technological salvation was expected to come from improved gear for players on the field, most particularly the helmet. League of Denial, the book that has advanced the story on CTE and brain trauma in football most successfully, includes a section on a particularly egregious example of such promotion of a new helmet model, a case of unjustified hype fairly early in the course of the crisis.

A more recent development in technology against football injury, though, seeks to address other factors. A pair of engineering students at Dartmouth University developed what has been called the MVP, or "Mobile Virtual Player." The students, one a former member of the Dartmouth football team, developed the MVP, essentially a robotic tackling dummy that simulates the movements of a runner to allow a defender to practice tackling.

MVP was a response to a maverick move by Buddy Teevens, the head coach at Dartmouth. Teevens, who also had head coaching stints at Tulane and Stanford in his career, returned to Dartmouth in 2005, where he had previously coached from 1987 to 1991. Five years ago, in response to his own rising concerns about concussions and other injuries, Teevens had decided to eliminate tacking drills in Dartmouth practices. The counterintuitive move didn't seem to hurt Dartmouth's defense; as the NPR article notes, the team's rate of missed tackles dropped by half in the first full season after the protocol was implemented, and the team sits at #2 in the preseason rankings for the Ivy League, mirroring Teevens's success in turning Dartmouth around from his earlier coaching stint. Teevens, though, still perceived that the team couldn't get experience with moving targets.

While it's encouraging to see people coming up with creative solutions, there are still concerns about relying on technological advances to fix football's problems. What problems, you ask?

1) Technology doesn't come cheap. Each of the MVPs Dartmouth is now using cost about $3500 to develop. A third MVP is on order at Dartmouth, and you might guess that a well-heeled Ivy League school can afford it. That's not a number that would deter an NFL team from ordering up a whole offensive platoon of them, and your Ohio States and Alabamas would have no trouble enticing a donor to pay for them as well. For Compass-Point State College, though, that could be a steep price, and for, say, a poor rural high school, that would be prohibitive. The ethical quandries abound. Who gets to play safely, and who has to put their brains at risk in practice as well as games? The divide between rich programs and poor programs would be cemented.

2) While the use of MVPs as a practice aid seems promising so far (it certainly seems to be working just fine at Dartmouth), it's too soon to say that for certain. A hit is still a hit, after all. In theory hitting a mobile dummy that wobbles like a Weeble should be less damaging than hitting another human being. It's still necessary to keep track of just how true this turns out to be.

3) Football has its own particular culture. It is a culture that more or less routinely expects its players to do, shall we say, rash things to prove their manhood. Can a sport that so reveres the "Oklahoma drill" seriously be expected to talk away from regular tackling drills?

4) Even if the MVP does prove to be beneficial in reducing injury in practice (and all you have to do is observe NFL preseason injury rates to know that this would be no small thing), there are still games to play. And very large and very fast people are still going to run into each other over and over again, and brains are still going to slosh around in skulls. And so far technology doesn't have any answers for that.

4a) And that becomes a problem that is pretty much always in play in any crisis where those affected in the crisis look to technology for answers. Continuing efforts to find technological answers to problems have a bad habit of both leading to unintended consequences, and delaying the actions that will inevitably be necessary to bring about real change. And people continue to get hurt, while the football world is "just killing time, with our eyes to the skies/waiting on science our savior..."*

*from "Murder in the Big House," from the album Chagall Guevara.

M-V-P! M-V-P! (photo credit: AP)