A concussion expert has called the NFL’s Guardian Caps a “scam,” dismissing them as a mere placebo that does little to protect against head injuries.
Guardian Caps were added in 2023 as soft-shell pads that cover football helmets and are designed to absorb contact from heavy head hits.
“The league’s data showed that if one player is wearing the Guardian Cap at the time of a helmet hit, the cap will absorb 11 to 12 percent of the force. If both players are wearing the cap and have a helmet-to-helmet hit, the force of the impact is reduced by around 20 percent,” the NFL said after they were mandated the pads for the regular-season.
NFL Executive Vice President Jeff Miller also said at the time that “there was a 52 percent decrease in concussions among players wearing Guardian Caps, compared with the concussion rate for players at the same positions over the previous three years of training camps when Guardian Caps weren’t worn,” per BroBible.
Speaking with Pablo Torre on his podcast, concussion expert Chris Nowinski, a former defensive tackle for Harvard who received his doctorate in behavioral neuroscience from Boston University in 2017, essentially dismissed the caps as a scam.
“Okay, so, one of the things to appreciate is this Guardian Cap was, existed; it was created by these, you know, independent people thinking, well, maybe more padding is the answer,” he said. “More padding is not the answer. We already know your brain is Jello floating in fluid. Putting more padding out will help in some situations, but it’s going to hurt in other situations, especially rotation. Bigger, heavier helmet, bigger radius, more rotation.”
“So, the NFL studied the Guardian Cap as it’s sold to high school players, called the XT, and they said, ‘This isn’t very good, but there’s an idea here. Let’s take it to our lab.’ What they did is they made something twice as heavy with different materials and that’s what the NFL players wear. It’s only sold for NFL players, called the NXT,” he added.
Nowinski said that the Guardian Caps being sold to high school and college players do not work in lab tests and “get a 2% reduction in rotational acceleration, the thing we think is most correlated with CTE.”
“So, Guardian Caps don’t work in high school. They might work in the NFL, a little bit. But what’s been most fascinating is their ability to confuse the public that what the NFL is wearing and mandates is the same thing that the kids are getting. And it’s not,” he added. “It’s the version the NFL rejected.”
“When they actually tried to get that published as a peer-reviewed study, and they used video, they found out it didn’t work,” Nowinski continued. “When they isolated hits to the padding, face mask hits magically were down. So it was like a small, random sample. They got the data they wanted. They went to the press and then when it was studied and it needed to be corrected, they did not correct it in the public.”
Nowinski even claimed that the NFL’s “own published study showed it wasn’t true.”
“They haven’t retracted it,” he added. “They haven’t made the same effort to pull those headlines back. It’s very clear from their behavior and the conversations I’ve had with them, they love that the public sees the Guardian Caps because its basically virtue signaling.”