American football is a collision sport. To stop the offense from advancing the ball, the defense must tackle the player with the ball by knocking or pulling him down. As such, defensive players must use some form of physical contact to bring the ball-carrier to the ground, within certain rules and guidelines. Tacklers cannot kick or punch the runner. They also cannot grab the face mask of the runner's helmet or lead into a tackle with their own helmet ("spearing"). Despite these and other rules regarding unnecessary roughness, most other forms of tackling are legal. Blockers and defenders trying to evade them also have wide leeway in trying to force their opponents out of the way. Quarterbacks are regularly hit by defenders coming on full speed from outside the quarterback's field of vision. This is commonly known as a blindside. To compensate for this, players must wear special protective equipment, such as a padded plastic helmets, shoulder pads, hip pads and knee pads. These protective pads were introduced decades ago and have improved ever since to help minimize lasting injury to players. An unintended consequence of all the safety equipment has resulted in increasing levels of violence in the game. Players may now hurl themselves at one another at high speeds without a significant chance of injury. The injuries that do result tend to be severe and often season or career-ending and sometimes fatal.
Brain injury
The Concussions Committee of the NFL, co-chaired by Dr. Ira Casson, has generally denied that concussions result in permanent brain injury. However, there is some research, reported in 2009, which, using phone interviews based on the National Health survey information, showed increased incidence of diagnosis of memory loss among retired professional football players. Such symptoms are believed related to the effects of such impact and concussion.
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