How a Football Helmet Industry Titan Sells the False Promise of Safety

“I want kids to play football,” Mike Rolando writes in an email. “And I want kids to be safe.” Rolando is the football coach at St. Edward’s Central Catholic High School in Elgin, Illinois. This year, he will begin outfitting some of his players with the new Riddell SpeedFlex helmet, which costs $400—a price, he says, that will allow his program to purchase “12 or so” of the helmets over the next four seasons, depending on the size of future budgets. When Rolando announced that his Green Wave players would soon be wearing the SpeedFlex on his Twitter account in January, he attached a simple message: “Protect the Wave.”

Question is, will Rolando’s good intentions—and additional money spent on expensive new helmets—actually make his players safer?

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“The future of football helmets has arrived,” Riddell, the nation’s top-selling football helmet manufacturer, proclaimed last August when introducing the SpeedFlex. The helmet’s defining feature is a flexible panel on its crown, and its side panels are built to flex upon impact as well. According to a company press release, the SpeedFlex “reduces impact force transfer to the athlete by selectively adding flexibility to key helmet components,” while “flexibility engineered into the helmet’s shell, face mask and face mask attachment system reduces impact force transfer to the athlete.”

A tech website praises the SpeedFlex’s ability to absorb impacts and evokes the crumple zones designed to soften car crashes (the specific phrase “although we admire old cars’ ability to hold together in a collision” appears in at least 50 different posts on the SpeedFlex across the Internet). A business website cites the “give” of the helmet’s crown panel and notes, “but extra protection isn’t cheap.” In late August and early September, the web was peppered with similar posts on any website whose readership might have even a tangential interest in football.

Conspicuously absent from this and other press releases, advertisements, and articles about the SpeedFlex, however, are claims that the helmet can reduce or prevent concussions.

Riddell has good reason to not advertise the SpeedFlex as a concussion-preventer: it can’t. As reported in the book League of Denial, the Federal Trade Commission ruled in 2013 that there was insufficient evidence to support a longstanding Riddell claim that its Revolution series of helmets “reduce concussions or the risk of concussions by 31 percent.” That claim—based on a study conducted by former members of the National Football League’s controversial and since-disbanded Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, which was funded by Riddell—did not stand up to scientific scrutiny. The University of Michigan’s Dr. Jeffrey Kutcher testified before the Senate Commerce Committee that “there is no significant data” to support Riddell’s claim. And, as reported in League of Denial, Riddell even attempted to extend the claim to the youth versions of its Revolution line, which weren’t included at all in the original study.

Still, Riddell is aware today’s helmet purchasers—parents, players, and teams—are primarily shopping for safety. Unsurprisingly, the company has managed to juke its way around the dreaded c-word. The SpeedFlex received a huge boost when it earned five stars from a consumer helmet safety rating system developed by researchers at Virginia Tech University. The school’s STAR (Summation of Tests for the Analysis of Risks) ratings are the most simple and digestible metric for helmet safety, a five-star system that mirrors automotive safety ratings, and have become the de facto standard for the industry. The SpeedFlex wasn’t just one out of nine helmets in the coveted five-star tier, it had the best STAR rating of all 23 helmets tested in the 2014 edition of the study.

The helmet industry now revolves around these rankings. Thad Ide, Riddell’s senior vice president for research and product development, recently told Bloomberg that the rankings have “driven adoption of more technology in helmets.” As more and more helmets reach the five-star tier every year, some schools refuse to buy anything in a lower tier, and when schools don’t splurge for five stars, parents push athletic departments to upgrade or buy the highest-rated helmets themselves. “The school district puts out a call for proposals, it’ll say in there, we’ll only take bids for 5-star Virginia Tech related helmets,” Virginia Tech researcher Stefan Duma told Good Morning America in October.

But the STAR ratings have issues. As Don Comrie, CEO of medical trial company PanMedix, told VICE Sports contributing editor Patrick Hruby in a recent Washingtonian article, the data Virginia Tech uses to calculate the STAR ratings appears incomplete, and perhaps fatally flawed. The Virginia Tech study tracked 1,833 players at eight colleges over six seasons and found just 64 concussions, or 1.3 per team, per season—a number that seems absurdly low, and suggests that the school’s researchers are missing a significant number of concussions, which in turn would skew the mathematical equations and laboratory impact tests Virginia Tech uses to calculate relative concussion risk among competing helmet models. “Garbage in,” Comrie told Hruby, “garbage out.”

Additionally, the STAR ratings measure linear acceleration of the head produced during impacts, but do not measure rotational acceleration. Both types of acceleration are believed to cause concussions, and some researchers believe the latter type is more harmful to the brain. A Virginia Tech primer on STAR methodology acknowledges this limitation, stating “currently there is substantial data on linear accelerations relating to concussion risk. Moreover, linear and rotational accelerations are highly correlated, and in general lowering linear will lower rotational.” However, Blaine Hoshizaki, director of the University of Ottawa’s Neuro-trauma Impact Science Laboratory, told Hruby that said correlation doesn’t hold for all types of helmet impacts. Moreover, he said that the specific design modifications made to reduce linear acceleration and earn higher STAR scores—creating larger helmet shells that can contain thicker interior padding—may amplify the risk of rotational acceleration.

“If you make a big, fat, soft helmet, you’re not just creating low linear acceleration,” Hoshizaki said. “You’re making a huge helmet that will increase the risk of getting hit and may create higher rotations. I don’t know if that’s a safer helmet.”

Duma vigorously disputes Hoshizaki’s analysis. He says that future STAR ratings will incorporate rotational acceleration, and maintains that Virginia Tech’s work already had resulted in safer helmets. For now, the schools’ ratings determine which models sell and which ones don’t. As Bloomberg reported, Riddell’s top competitor, Schutt, redesigned two of its existing helmets—the Vengeance VTD and AiR XP Pro VTD—specifically to conform to the Virginia Tech study. VTD stands for “Variable Thickness and Durometers” but could just as easily stand for “Virginia Tech Designed.” Indeed, a press release for the product notes that the cushioning in both helmets has been “re-designed … to maximize performance to the Virginia Tech STAR protocol.”

Schutt’s five-star “VTD” versions have been the company’s best sellers since they hit the market. Similarly, Rawlings has revived its helmet line through the production of a five-star helmet, the Quantum Plus, and now has a second five-star offering called the Tachyon. But nobody profits more than Riddell, which marked its fourth consecutive year atop the STAR ratings with the SpeedFlex. The marketing punch of a five-star rating is particularly significant when Riddell’s top-rated options are sold at a premium, often costing at least $50 more than competitors’ helmets.

“We tried Xenith a few years ago,” Rolando wrote to VICE Sports, “have tried Schutt, but we seem to have landed on Riddell as our best option. I used to look at the Virginia Tech helmet rating and study, and over time, I’ve just come to trust that Riddell will be at the forefront of the safety charge.”

This trust, once earned, can be extremely hard to break. In August 2014, the University of Wisconsin released a study involving over 2,000 high school football players that found no difference in concussion rates across helmets, whether by brand, age, or recondition status. It can take time for academic research to make its way to the mainstream, but as the success of Schutt’s VTD line shows, helmet sales continue to be driven by the STAR ratings. Virginia Tech even plans to release youth football ratings by spring 2015, and ratings for baseball, softball, and lacrosse are slated for summer 2016.

The concussion crisis has resonated with parents and coaches of football players across the country. People see the problem, and they’re looking for solutions. Backed by advertising campaigns revolving around high-tech looking safety features and the authority of the Virginia Tech rating system, helmets like the SpeedFlex give people a way forward. “I will consider any safety product that I come across,” Rolando wrote. “If viable, I will research them. If I think they will add to our safety philosophy, I will find funds for them.”

Coaches like Rolando are doing the best they can. Unfortunately, their resources are restricted to limited studies like Virginia Tech’s and misleading advertising from companies like Riddell. Schools and teams are put in a position where they feel like they have no choice but to spend extra money in order to make football as safe as possible. St. Edward’s Central Catholic’s purchase of 12 Riddell SpeedFlex’s at $400 each costs $1200 more than a purchase of 12 Xenith EPICs or Rawlings Tachyons (both five stars), $1740 more than 12 Schutt Vengeances (four stars) and a whopping $2400 more than 12 Schutt AiR XP Pros (four stars). (For those who still demand a five-star rating, the latter helmets are available in the “VTD” at the same price as well).

To outfit a full squad with the Riddell SpeedFlex could cost a 50-man high school team over $10,000 more than doing so with competing helmets. At that price, particularly for many cash-strapped schools, a resulting safety dividend should be obvious. Not dubious. Is the SpeedFlex a great leap forward, the future of football brain protection? Strip away vague claims about “impact force transfer,” and there’s no way to tell.

Consider Green Bay Packers running back Eddie Lacy. Lacy claims he didn’t suffer a single concussion through high school or college, but suffered two in his first pro season with Green Bay in 2013. The former Alabama runner became one of the lucky players to try out the SpeedFlex during its 2014 debut. During the Packers’ season opener against the Seattle Seahawks, he suffered another concussion. “They said it’s supposed to stop concussions,” Lacy told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “A few of us had them on the team. I guess you just try it out. I tried it out and I think I’ll go back.” When that’s the case, it’s hard not to wonder what coaches such as Rolando are really paying for.