7 Days Until Presentation Date

With 7 days remaining, I am onto the final stretch of senior thesis.

I edited my LETRR Proposal and it is ready to be submitted to my judges and Mr. Correa.

I have contacted my mentor that way I can get the mentor profile form completed.

I am organizing all that I need and putting it on my flashdrive.

Here is the script to my final presentation.

Final Presentation Script (Up Until LETRR Part)

Good morning and thank you all for being here, my name is Yousef Nofal and I am a senior at the School for the Talented and Gifted. The title of my thesis presentation is - Concussions and Football: A Hidden Epidemic. 

Is it safe to assume that everybody in this room watched the Super Bowl? Super Bowl 49 became the most watched program in American television history, with an average amount of 114.4 million viewers. That’s more than a third of the entire country. So with a third of the entire country watching, what do we see? An unacceptable handling of an issue the NFL has been trying to quell for years. 

He had 109 receiving yards and the game winning touchdown. You know what else Patriot’s wide recover Julian Edelman may have had? A concussion. As you see in this first clip, Edelman catches the ball down the middle of the field and immediately makes contact with a defender, only to remain upright and continue to “wobble” down the field. What type of contact exactly? An uncalled 15 yard penalty for helmet to helmet contact. Later on that same drive, we see Edelman catch another pass before falling to the ground and having to crawl and be assisted by one of his teammates to get up. Edelman did not come out of the game, allowing him to finish the drive, possibly concussed, and then receive testing. He wasn’t even led into the locker room for an extensive evaluation, just a quick baseline test that relies on honest self-reporting took place. And even this story has some skeptical, for when asked whether or not he took a concussion test on the sideline, Edelman responded by saying, “we’re not allowed to talk about injuries.”

So who knows if Edelman underwent testing. The real question is - why all the secrecy from the NFL? Why are we having to rely on reports from outside observers and anonymous sources to find out if the NFL’s concussions protocol was followed to the letter? Wasn’t this policy created to appease fans’ fears of watching players wantonly destroy their own minds? This year’s Super Bowl was also known for its heavily emotional commercials. Yet, we did not see a single commercial about making the game safer and keeping the head out of the game of football. Death is an emotional subject. Let’s not forget all the players who have lost their lives from CTE or Alzheimer’s. 

Edelman clearly showed symptoms of a concussion. Whether he was concussed or not, he decided that he was not coming out in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl. It all boils down to this point: players like Edelman shouldn’t have to, or even be allowed to, make that choice for themselves because they are not medical professionals.

I have spent the last 8 or so months, give or take, doing research in this field of study related to mild traumatic brain injuries and the game of football. The events I have covered this year, ranging from the suicide of Ohio State Buckeye’s defensive lineman Kosta Karageorge to Hall of Famer and ex-Cowboy star Tony Dorsett’s diagnosis of CTE, have been an eye opening experience for me. For many Americans, myself included, football is more than just a game. However, football is on the decline. Participation at the youth level has seen it’s greatest decline in the past years since Pop Warner began keeping statistics decades ago. In order to preserve the game that us Americans cherish so much, we must draw attention to the concussion crisis and find a way to protect athletes at all ages and levels from the risks that they face.

I have taken on this challenge by creating LETRR, a comprehensive proposal for the betterment of concussion management in the game of football. Football players don letterman jackets, and hopefully will make benefit from LETRR, Legislation, Equipment, Technology, Rules, and Regulation. 

To begin, I would like to show you all a video that epitomizes the necessity for legal changes in youth football. 

I pose a simple question: would you let your 8 or 9 year old son experience what you have just watched?

Legislation is the backbone to ensure that future generations of children will continue to play the sport of football. Therefore, legislative changes are of the utmost importance. What I am set to propose is a classic case of “easier said than done” and that is strict standardization.

What do I mean by strict standardization? Basically, I’m calling for a complete overhaul of current state concussion laws in favor of one more stringent federal law. Concussion legislation varies far too greatly between states, emphasizing a neglect for children’s safety. How come only Michigan requires baseline cognitive testing at the beginning of the school year? Do the other 49 states and Washington D.C. not care about their students safety? In my proposal, I’ve detailed the eight core legislative elements found in concussion legislation and under my proposed federal legislation, all eight of those elements become 100% mandatory for every state. Also, I’ve detailed my other main legislative change: placing age restrictions on football. Up until the age of 12, only flag football should be played, reducing brain strain greatly on adolescent. From 12-13 a transitory period of wrap-up football is played, allowing athletes to learn proper tackling techniques which I will cover later on in my presentation. Lastly, from 14 onward proper tackle football can be played, allowing for a smooth transition from junior high to high school football. 

Moving on through LETRR, the next topic of interest for the betterment of concussion management in the game of football centers around equipment. 

We can dive right into the one piece of equipment that everybody knows has some type of relation to mild traumatic brain injuries and that is the helmet, so let’s not circle around the issue and let’s attack it head on. Modern day football helmets are simply ineffective. Helmets in use today do no protect against concussions at all, they are designed to protect against catastrophic injuries. What I propose is to implement a helmet like MIPS, the multi-directional impact protection system. MIPS helmets have been proven to reduce brain strain by as much as 50 percent, for it’s creative design of a sliding plastic layer eliminates some of the rotational or oblique force before it makes its way to the brain. Some may question: Aren’t you just trading off less concussions for more catastrophic injuries? The answer to that is simply no. Take rugby as an example. The rate of catastrophic injuries in rugby is actual almost identical to the rate of catastrophic injuries in american football. Even with helmets, football players still are at a risk for catastrophic injuries. MIPS helmets will only reduce the concussion rate, no adverse effects will ensue with its implementation. Other ideas that I propose is the mandatory usage of mouth guards. Most people do not know that mouth guards are not even mandatory in the game of football and that a blow to the jaw can cause a concussion. Making mouth guards mandatory to all players with the exception of the quarterback and defensive signal caller will allow the game to be played safer while allowing for communication between players to go about smoothly. Lastly, neck rolls, the big collar like equipment around a players neck that restricts the head and neck from jolting back to quickly, should be mandatory for all lineman, both offensive and defensive for these players undergo the most amount of sub-concussive hits. In recent years, usage of the neck roll has declined due to complaints about its restrictive nature. However, if Eric Dickerson can rush for an NFL single season record of 2,105 yards while wearing a neck roll, that “restrictive” argument doesn’t really add up. 

Technology is every where throughout my proposal. From baseline testing, to equipment technology, to the main focus - sensor technology. Actually, when I heard that UTD was working on a wearable sensor that could  measure the frequency, severity, and direction of hits, I shifted my thesis project from being centered around knee ligament injury prevention to concussion prevention. The amount of data that could potentially be collected from sensor technology will be a crucial component in helping to reduce the concussion rate in the game of football. 

The last part of my proposal deals with rules and regulation. Ask yourself this question. How come we never hear about concussions in rugby even though those players play with no pads and are generally deemed as tougher than football players? That’s because rugby players know how to tackle properly. One team in the NFL has publicly made it known that they are a rugby-style, shoulder tackling team. That team: the Seattle Seahawks, the NFL’s best defensive team. Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll has released a 21 minute instructional video the details the many different types of tackles that his team utilizes from the basic Hawk Tackle (the teaching points being: eyes through the thighs, wrap and squeeze, and drive for 5 - which is pushing the ball carrier back five yards when necessary) to the Hawk roll tackle in which the tackler rolls himself and the ball carrier after contact. Making implementation of Seahawks tackling mandatory throughout the NFL will force lower football leagues like the NCAA to implement it as well. At the same time, implementation of Seahawks tackling will eliminate spear tackling, a dangerous “tackling” method in which a player uses their body as a spear and their helmet as the tip. I also call for an alteration in current penalties for helmet to helmet collision. I propose changing the current penalty from 15 yard to 20 yards for a straight on helmet to helmet collision between a defender and the ball carrier. If a pass is thrown to a receiver and the receiver has full possession of the ball momentarily before the hit, than a helmet to helmet collision that causes the receiver to drop or fumble the ball past 20 yards from where the ball was initially thrown will result in a penalty that places the ball at the spot of the foul. If the pass is within 20 yards, a penalty will result in which 10 yards will be added from the spot of the foul. By changing the way tackling is made and enforcing harsher penalties for improper tackling, the game of football will without a doubt become much more safer.