Anybody who has played will tell you the perilous truth: Football with and without pads could be two different sports.
That helmet changes everything.
It's an alarming distinction. The piece of equipment developed to protect the player is instead a fateful hazard, a false sense of security.
"It's referred to as risk compensation, or risk homeostasis," Dr. Erik Swartz told Sporting News. "When a player has a body part that's protected, and the contact with somebody else is imminent, you're going to put your protected body part first, just reflexively."
Swartz, a former rugby player, is a kinesiology professor at the University of New Hampshire. It's there he implemented a two-year study to test the effectiveness of what he calls the Helmetless Tackling Training Technique.
That's right ... no helmets.
Inspired by a clear difference in tackling habits between football and rugby, Swartz developed the procedure hoping to train football players to "keep their heads out of the game."
He wants football with and without pads to look and feel like the same sport.
You do, too, if you want it to stick around.
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Before Linnea Garcia-Tatupu's husband Mosi died of a heart attack in 2010, their marriage had deteriorated along with the former Patriots fullback's memory. The family at the time didn't know what chronic traumatic encephalopathy was, let alone what it was doing to their lives.
Repetitive head injuries are believed to be a cause for CTE, an undetectable brain disease that also can bring on depression or dementia. Garcia-Tatupu told the Boston Globe she is terrified because their son, Lofa, played six years in the NFL for the Seahawks. He, like over a million high school participants last year, played a game often referred to as "knockin' heads."
"To this day, I can't stand the sound of the equipment hitting together," Garcia-Tatupu said.
MORE: NFL's alarming CTE presence
Traumatic brain injury, memory loss, death, lawsuits — some label the sport's concussion dilemma an epidemic, although we arrived with the best intentions. The leather helmets of old, when up to 30 people a year died playing football, evolved into plastic shells that moderate pain and dissipate collisions.
But it's a catch-22: The increased safety leads to an increased threshold to assume risk.
"When I played rugby, we only put on the equipment (scrum caps, thin shoulder pads) when it was necessary," Swartz explained. "Contrast that with football … I'll use the example of 'non-contact' practices. They're wearing helmets. The question is why."
The answer is culture and an over-reliance on the equipment's protective capabilities. Linemen for example wear scuffs on their helmets like badges of honor: "See that orange one? That's from when I cleaned some dude's clock Friday night," or "Man, that guy's helmet is all beat up. He must be tough." Kids are told to keep helmets on at all times, in part because they must adjust to visibility limitations and additional weight.
But in that comfort, players develop a sense of invincibility. Then they're told not to rely on their protection. Swartz compared the theory to every-day motor vehicles, pointing out that "once they started having anti-lock breaks, padded interiors and seat belts, accident rates went up … deaths went up."
Dr. Anthony Kontos, assistant director of research for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Sports Medicine concussion program, explained to SN: "This notion has come out of cycling and motorcycle literature, where helmet laws have been (modified). There's been speculation about whether mandating helmet use has increased or decreased risk-taking behavior."
Football without helmets, an idea former Steelers receiver Hines Ward has suggested, is not farfetched. It's already happening in parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Texas, where the A7FL has a presence.
Players in the seven-on-seven, full contact football league operate with no protective equipment — no helmets, no shoulder pads; nothing but bodies and a ball. The idea came from co-founder and president Ryan DePaul as a place to play the rare game of pick-up football, but its relevance has evolved since 2006 as brain-injury awareness within the sport has mushroomed.
"Definitely less concussions," DePaul told SN of injuries he sees compared to conventional leagues. "Ankles, legs and all that are going to be the same. But you're not getting that constant repetition of blows to the head. You can play a whole game and not get a blow to the head."
The A7FL's talent level reaches semi-pro players looking to stay in football shape through the spring. With the theory of risk compensation rooted in its cause, would this style make sense from tiny-mite all the way up to the NFL?
One would think that, without protection from a hard shell, Brandon Meriweather would have been less inclined to do this to Todd Heap.
James Harrison would not have speared Josh Cribbs like this.
And Dunta Robinson would have avoided such a brutal shot to Jeremy Maclin.
Wouldn't they?
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The nature of the sport, and of those who play it, are perpetual factors. Former Panthers fullback Brad Hoover, in a conversation with SN, called football a "combat sport" rather than a contact or collision sport. He knows why "injuries come with it."
Even the slightest hesitation separates the good from the best.
"It's a mentality you have to have, because you cannot play football with fear," said Dr. Brian Monteleone, president of Psychological Services of Charlotte and a former high school quarterback. "You will not be the best player, and odds are, you won't be playing very long."
That's how somebody like Chris Borland, the 49ers linebacker who retired in 2015 after just one successful NFL season with concerns about head injuries, makes it to the pros.
Undersized at 5-11, 248 pounds, Borland played at full speed with as much fear as Tony Stark in his Iron Man ensemble. The 24-year-old understood he had no choice but to play that way, and he called it quits before it was too late. That's rare, if not unprecedented.
"When you mandate things (like helmets), you can also change the type of players that play certain sports," Kontos added. "If given the choice to wear a bicycle helmet or not, a certain type of person is going to make that decision … some gravitate toward sports with more equipment.
"It's a different sort of personality. We can never take that out of the equation."
Another problematic component: NFL players today look like ogres — lightning-fast ogres — compared to 1943, when helmets became mandated.
Dr. Patrick Moyer, a sports physics expert who spent 17 years in UNC Charlotte's department of physics and optical science before accepting the Athletics Director position at Cannon School in Concord, N.C., explained what bigger and faster means for football.
"Injury damage is directly proportional to kinetic energy, which is 1/2 times mass times velocity squared," he told SN. "So if you get 50 percent faster and 50 percent bigger, you get 400 percent more energy.
"You know how much energy Julius Peppers is carrying out there with him? It's going to do some damage. You're talking about a lot of energy that has to be dissipated that wasn't there in the past. We've got high school athletes who are as big and fast as NFL athletes were 30 years ago."
The good news is helmet technology has finally caught up. The bad news is helmet technology has finally caught up … and brain injury persists.
Dr. Stefon Duma, who heads a program at the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences that gauges and rates the effectiveness of modern football helmets, told SN he has observed the enhancement within the last five years. He used the new Riddell Speed Flex, which features a flexible shell, as an example of how "there's clearly research going on with these companies to look at newer, different ways of making a helmet."
The shells do a fine job decelerating impact, thus preventing fractures and lacerations — their initial purpose. But there's no way to put a harness on the brain, and nothing can be done about it sloshing around.
No helmet can prevent a concussion.
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While those in or around the A7FL might disagree, most consider the idea of football without helmets impractical. The inevitable comparison is rugby, another "combat" sport minus the padding.
Would football's entertainment value would be compromised if helmets were banned? Upon observing the brutality of rugby hits, that question becomes comical.
There are mixed reviews on rugby's concussion rate as it compares to that of football, primarily due to unreported, undetected or untreated cases in both sports. Rugby, which like football is having to shake its reputation as a culture ignorant to concussion risk, is receiving higher numbers of reported cases as awareness and treatment increases.
Swartz believes football helmets are necessary for full-contact scrimmages and games. But he's trying to prove players can learn to keep them out of the habitual tackling equation.
For the ongoing study at UNH, a treatment group of 25 players go through tackling drills without helmets once a week in practice, while a control group of 25 more uses typical equipment. Awareness, while imperative for the sport's future, is considered "contamination" for Swartz's examination. He explained how recognition alone might lead the control group to think, "Oh, wow, maybe I should be a little more careful with how I tackle."
While he can't draw conclusions until the study is complete, Swartz says "coaches, who are watching practice films and game films all the time, anecdotally, say they see a difference" in technique.
But for younger players whose habits are developing, recognition takes a back seat to instruction.
Moyer hired Hoover this year to head Cannon's football program. With the combined expertise of a physics expert and a former pro player, the duo employs a unique sensitivity to the game's dangers. The safety burden, at least at this level, is on them.
"You're assuming every coach is teaching them to do it the right way," said Hoover, whose nine-year career with Carolina included a Super Bowl appearance. "Football coaches sometimes are stubborn about things, and it's just keeping an open mind that the game has evolved over time.
"I'm teaching my kids to approach it the right way. We're trying to educate, not only myself as a coach, but working with the athletic trainers; just educating them on the fact that these are serious risks. Like anything, (the kids) are either going to believe you or not, and you hope you come across in a way that it seems real. It's either received or you have to find another way to bring it across."
Hoover, like many coaches, is teamed with Heads Up Football, an indispensable program that inspires proper tackling form. He noted how rules have changed; that there wasn't an emphasis at all on head injuries when he played.
Some complain about such innovation. They accuse the NFL — or in this case, the "No Fun League" — of softening the game. Nobody is allowed to hit anymore, some say. Get used to it, because the adjustments are working.
The league reported a 25 percent decrease in concussion rate for 2014 and a 36 percent decrease since 2012. Better yet, about half as many concussions were the result of helmet-to-helmet (or shoulder-to-helmet) hits.
"Look at what the NFL's done," Duma pointed out. "They've shown you can do this. You have to make sure the players don't use (helmets) as a weapon."
And considering the physics of increasingly forceful collisions, Moyer concluded, "now it's even more incumbent on us to minimize dirty hits and the hits where the athletes are just not properly taught."
A well-proportioned mix of awareness, instruction and regulation is the solution. If risk compensation is addressed and the feeling of invincibility is diminished, the sport with pads will look and feel more like the sport without pads.
"If it doesn't," Hoover said, "we won't have football."