🧠 Do Guardian Caps Actually Work

Seemingly overnight, Guardian Caps took over the NFL, with the league bragging about a ground-breaking 52% decrease in concussions because of them.

But what if I told you that the science behind Guardian Caps isn’t as clear as the NFL wants you to think? And, in fact, they actually reveal a much more serious problem that the league has been trying to distract us from for years.

Well, this isn’t some conspiracy theory; it’s real. But to fully understand it, we have to go back to 1996 when a chemical engineer named Lee Hanson founded the Hanson Group.

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Table of Contents

• 🧠 The Origin of Guardian Caps

• 🔬 The Science Behind Helmet Add-Ons

• 🗓️ The NFL’s Real Issue

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🧠 The Origin of Guardian Caps

Founding Story: Lee Hanson started his company to provide specialized materials for various products, from golf ball coatings to anti-ballistic glass for the military.

However, in 2010, a company approached him asking for his help developing a coating for the exterior of a football helmet that could help it flex to reduce impact.

Ultimately, the idea didn’t work, but it was the first time Lee and his wife Erin realized that there was an opportunity to use their talents in the football market.

Opportunity: 2010 was the same year that the first lawsuit was filed against the NFL for concealing information about the danger of concussions, which eventually resulted in the league settling with former players for $765 million in 2013.

This meant it was the perfect time for Erin and Lee Hanson to start a company focused on protecting football players from head injuries. So, in 2011, the couple founded “Guardian Sports” and began prototyping their now iconic “Guardian Cap” in their family kitchen.

But I’m not sure if they could have even predicted the significance of what they had created.

Silver Bullet? By 2022, the biggest sports league in the world was mandating that nearly every player wear their product during training camp and contact practices.

But that’s not all, because the following year, the NFL began touting a 52% decrease in concussions thanks to the soft-shelled caps, a remarkable claim for a league that had once again been caught in the cross-fire over player safety concerns.

So why doesn’t the story just end here?

Why doesn’t the NFL also mandate that these things be worn in games and claim it’s doing “all it can” to protect player safety?

Well, the short answer is because they’d be lying, but the longer answer is actually much more complicated.

🔬 The Science Behind Helmet Add-Ons

The Numbers: The first thing that’s important to know about add-on safety products like Guardian Caps is that they don’t actually prevent concussions. Sure, it makes for a good headline, but even the company’s founders don’t claim that their products can “prevent” head injuries.

What these add-ons are actually doing is absorbing the impact of a hit, which, in turn, reduces the likelihood of a concussion.

But even that claim is controversial because while Guardian itself claims that it can reduce the impact force to a player’s head by 33%, the NFL’s own research has found that the cap actually only absorbs about 10-20% of the force from a hit.

However, when these claims were studied at places like the University of North Carolina and the University of Nevada, researchers found “no difference” between the forces experienced by players wearing Guardian Caps and those who did not.

And the best part is that even the NFL is quietly admitting that it knows Guardian Caps aren’t the best solution to reduce the force of impacts on players’ heads, even as it has been publicly mandating their use across the league.

Because just this year, the NFL released a list of five “Guardian Cap-optional” helmets that it determined would keep players “just as protected, if not more, than if they had a Guardian Cap.”

This immediately made me wonder why the NFL doesn’t mandate all of its players wear one of these five helmets and get rid of Guardian Caps altogether. But the more research I did, the more I realized that by doing that, the league could actually be jeopardizing player safety even more.

Risk Homeostasis: That’s because of a concept called “risk homeostasis,” which one study describes as “an individual’s choice of behavior being influenced by their perception of risk of injury.”

In the context of football, this means that since athletes wear hard-shelled helmets, they think that their heads are safer from injury than they really are.

It’s why there was such a large spike in head and neck injuries immediately after NFL players started switching from soft, leather caps to hard plastic helmets. It’s also why countless studies have found that rugby players who wear no pads at all are actually safer from head injuries than football players who wear literal armored helmets.

But what does this mean for Guardian Caps?

Well, for one, there’s a risk that Guardian Caps could make players feel even more comfortable hitting with their heads, leading to more head injuries… even with the extra padding.

However, there hasn’t been a lot of data released about this yet.

Instead, I think the use of Guardian Caps calls into question just how effective these safety add-ons can even be.

Because sure, it’s great that NFL players are receiving an extra layer of padding, but as the NFLPA’s lead concussion researcher, Dr. Kristy Arbogas, said, it’s just one of many layers that leads to improved player safety, which also includes:

• Reduced padded practices

• Improved helmet designs

• Rule changes that are meant to disincentivize players from helmet-to-helmet contact

But even if the NFL does all of that, they’re still not doing everything they can, and they know it.

They’re just not willing to change their plans.

🗓️ The NFL’s Real Issue

Subconcussive Hits: In my research, the one word that kept coming up over and over again that I rarely hear discussed was “sub-concussive hits.”

They’re the type of hits that one Purdue University study says can happen up to 1,800 times per season to a high school football player and likely hundreds more times in the pros.

And while individually, these hits will never result in an official concussion diagnosis, over time, they can be just as bad, if not worse, than a regular concussion:

So essentially, football players are constantly getting a bunch of mini-concussions that medical professionals can’t recognize until it’s too late.

And this gets to the core of my problem with products like the Guardian Cap.

Because the NFL managed to find the most obvious and obnoxious-looking piece of equipment that it can use to signal to people that it’s doing “all it can” to reduce concussions, meanwhile, the real cause of a vast majority of these concussions and the CTE that kicks in after, are the repeated hits that will only be made worse as the league continues to try and add more games to the regular season.

And through no fault of Lee and Erin at Guardian, who are genuinely trying to reduce the impact of these repeated hits, the NFL now gets to use these caps as a prop to claim that it is doing everything it can to protect player safety while simultaneously trying to undermine it by adding more games to the schedule.

And at the end of the day, you can wear as many Guardian Caps as you want, but none of it matters if your head just keeps taking more hits.

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👋 Happy Friday and happy holidays!

We’re back to our regularly scheduled programming next week, see you then.