Why Did Plastic Football Helmets Make Football More Violent?

Roman Mars says early leather football helmets were hard and rigid like a shoe. They beat a bare head, but multiple players still died when a hit caved the skull in. The leather was not strong enough, the skull broke, and bone poked into the brain. Bone in the brain could be almost instantly fatal, so leather was not a permanent solution and the plastic helmet entered the picture.

The first plastic helmets came in the late 1930s from a company called Riddell. Founder John Riddell fabricated helmets for the American military during World War II. When the war ended, the company went back to football helmets made from a plastic compound called Tenite: a round, hard dome with a chin strap. They were really good at preventing the injuries then plaguing college football. Safety talk centered on breaks, specifically skull fractures. People said a player got his bell rung or was seeing stars, with much less public awareness of brain trauma. A plastic helmet does not cave in the way leather did.

The same shell made other aspects of the game less safe. Roman Mars says the plastic helmet could be used as a weapon, and the effort to make the game safer made parts of it more violent. A helmeted skull crashing into another player's knee blows out the knee, so extremities became a safety concern, and there was a debate about going back to leather. A public health professor and author of No Game for Boys to Play, a history of youth football, says players are playing in a more dangerous way. She says a hit with a plastic helmet might leave the other person more injured than leather would.