NFL Guardian Cap Helmet Covers Slash Concussion Risk 50 Percent

It is August, so naturally the stores are full of Halloween decorations and the news is full of NFL football coverage. While the costumes haven’t changed much, the football players do look a little different this year because some of them are wearing Guardian Cap helmet covers.

The Guardian Cap is a padded soft cover that attaches to the outside of a regular hard-shell football helmet that reduces the impact severity by 10 percent by itself, or by 20 percent when two Guardian Cap-equipped helmets collide.

Nearly all players are wearing the protective gear over their regular helmets in any of the shots you’re seeing from NFL training camps. And some players have gotten so used to the extra padding on their helmets that they are wearing the extra protection during pre-season games too. In April, the NFL even made it permissible for players who choose to do so to wear the Guardian Cap on their helmet in regular-season games this year.

In this respect, the NFL is lagging far behind grass-roots football, which has seen youth teams, high schools, and colleges using Guardian Caps for nearly a decade already. Guardian has coach testimonials from these lower levels of the sport dating back to 2015. Guardian Sports founders Erin and Lee Hanson applied their backgrounds in the material science business to engineer, patent, and manufacture the Guardian Cap starting in 2010.

The NFL began testing the waters of Guardian Cap use during 2022 training camps, and then they were mandated during the 2023 season at every preseason practice, as well as every regular-season and postseason practice with contact. Players at position groups where head contact is seen most are required to wear the Guardian Cap. The only positions not required to wear the caps are kickers, punters, quarterbacks, wide receivers, and defensive backs.

During these practices, the league said that it found a more than 50 percent reduction in concussions among players wearing the Guardian Cap. “We were really impressed with the information, maybe even a little bit surprised,” said Jeff Miller, NFL executive vice president overseeing player health and safety. And half of the concussions that did occur were the result of impacts on the facemask, which isn’t covered by the Guardian Cap, he added in a discussion posted on NFL.com.

In April, the league decided it had seen enough to proceed with regular season game use. “We now have two years of data showing significant concussion reductions among players who wear Guardian Caps during practice so players will be permitted to wear the cap during games this upcoming season,” Miller said in the NFL’s statement.

The on-field results are backed by lab testing. “Each and every time we put the Guardian Cap on, the impact severity was reduced,” observed Dr. Jeff Crandall, chair of the NFL Engineering Committee. “Overall, when we looked across all the helmet models, we saw that if one player was wearing the Guardian Cap or one helmet was wearing it, we had a 10 percent average reduction in impact severity. And if we put it on both helmets, we sort of get double the benefit. We saw that there was a 20 percent reduction.”

This is important because there is a difference between the severe impacts that cause concussions and the smaller repetitive impacts that are believed to contribute to players developing Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), the brain injury that leaves players with premature disability and dementia. “CTE doesn’t appear to be related to a single head injury,” explains the Mayo Clinic. “It’s related to repeated head injuries, often occurring in contact sports or military combat.”

Considering the downside of head impacts and the increasing familiarity with the cap by players, there is increasing interest in continuing to wear them during the season. “I am 100 percent pro-Guardian Cap,” reported NFL tight end Colin Thompson. “In the world we live in today, where there’s more science, there’s more knowledge, you know, sadly, a player passes away and they use their brain to see what’s going on in there and you’re seeing a lot of CTE,” he said. “I think it is a fantastic thing the NFL’s done. If it gets it 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent better, I think every player would say, ‘Sure, let me wear it.’ Because I don’t notice it in practice. I don’t feel the difference.”

Not being able to feel a difference is the key to broad acceptance during the regular-season games. But getting players used to the sight of them is also important. Fortunately, youth, high school, and college teams are using Guardian Caps, so players will become used to them from a young age.

“Kids, actually, they’ve gotten used to wearing them,” reports University of Virginia defensive ends coach and retired NFL player Chris Slade. “They thought they were kind of corny looking at first, but they know, ‘You’re going to wear them. It is going to be for your protection.’” Slade explained. “It has paid off for us pretty big.”

The caps look a little less unusual when a fabric cover printed with the team colors and logo is stretched over them, approximating the appearance of a larger regular helmet.

An alternative technology that has a smooth glossy surface is SAFR Sports helmet cap. This cap looks even more like a conventional helmet and has delivered strong results from testing by the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab. When installed on a helmet that is already one of the lab’s five-star products, the SAFR cap produced impact scores from lab testing that correspond with a 77 percent reduction in the likelihood of a concussion than just wearing the helmet. In the very hardest hits, that reduction is still 72 percent.

The Virginia Tech football team put the SAFR caps on players during the annual spring scrimmage in 2023, and neither fans nor media in attendance even noticed that players were wearing anything unusual, according to Dr. Stefan Duma, director of Virginia Tech’s Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Sciences.

Based on that experience, the Virginia Tech football team saw two players decide to wear the SAFR caps all season. Center Kaden Moore and offensive tackle Parker Clements chose to stick with the SAFR cap when the team’s regular season started in 2023. “I didn’t even notice I’m wearing the helmet cover during practice, so it just makes sense to keep it on for games,” Clements explained.

Another benefit to adding a soft external cap to the helmet is that it protects the helmet itself. This reduces maintenance costs for cash-strapped youth and school teams, but it could also prevent situations such as the high-profile incident last season when Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes saw his helmet break on impact during a cold-weather game that made the helmet’s plastic shell brittle.

The Canadian Football League is ahead of the NFL, with players wearing the Guardian Cap in a regular season game on August 16.