Oklahoma Continues to be Proactive in Player Safety With Guardian Caps
Player safety has always been at the forefront at Oklahoma.
From sickle cell research to the recent surge in science surrounding head injuries, the athletic training staff at the University of Oklahoma continues to be on the lookout for innovative solutions to achieve player safety. .
Which is why over the course of spring and fall camp, fans may have seen peculiar coverings over the iconic OU football helmets that almost resemble extra padding.
Guardian Caps, it turns out, are exactly that — extra padding. Very high-tech padding that forms a soft-shell on the surface of the helmet, aimed at reducing the impact from repeated hits to athletes’ heads.
Kennedy Brooks (left), seen standing beside Spencer Rattler, equipped with a Guardian Cap at practice last week.
John E. Hoover / SI Sooners
Starting in 2011, the goal of Guardian was always to provide a solution to the safety problem in football, and the Hanson Group stepped in to help.
Already a longtime member of the science, technology and coating space, the Hanson Group is a business-to-business solution provider for everything from football helmets to bed coatings in trucks.
But Erin Hanson, CEO and co-owner of the group with Lee Hanson, were happy to step into the space in 2010.
“We had somebody come to us and say, ‘Hey, this hard shell (football helmet) is being used as a weapon; we want to soften the exterior of a football helmet,’ ” Hanson told SI Sooners. “We were kind of before our time.”
Reinventing the football helmet would have been an incredibly costly undertaking.
Not only would it be expensive to design and test different variations of a “better” football helmet, it would also be a tough sell for teams all across the country to jettison their current helmets to outfit themselves with a completely new model.
Besides, Hanson, who’s father played center at Purdue, knew that the hard-shell helmet did bring its own protections to the gridiron.
“If you look at the skull fractures before the hard shell was introduced, I mean they virtually — not virtually, they eliminated skull fractures in the game,” she said. “So I definitely think that the hard shell has its value.”
So the team at Guardian came up with a rather elegant solution. Keep the hard-shell helmets, and add a one-size-fits-all soft shell to the outside of it, attacking the problem from both the safety side of things and the economic side.
Teams wouldn’t have to purchase new helmets, and testing has shown that the Guardian Cap can limit the forces exerted from various hits by between 20 to 33 percent.
“If I asked you to slam your head right now on this table and you had a hard shell (helmet) on, wouldn’t you rather put a pad down? You’re gonna want something, that’s what common sense tells you,” Hanson said. “If you’re going to have any kind of hit to your ribs or your knees or your head, you would rather it be a third less than what it was originally going to be.
“I think they both have their value, and that’s why I feel like it’s a really good combination.”
OU linebackers coach Brian Odom instructing his unit at practice
John E. Hoover / SI Sooners
The NFL appears to agree, as the league put the Guardian Cap to the test in 2020.
As the NFL has come under fire over revelations of what impact brain injuries — specifically concussions — have on football players, the league has poured more and more money in to brain and helmet research.
In an effort to mitigate the factors surrounding Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), the prevailing theory that concussions and continued head impacts that do not cause concussion-like symptoms (known as sub-concussive impacts), build up over a player’s career, leading an altering of the chemistry of the brain.
Testing out the Guardian Cap NXT, alongside another soft-shell solution called the ProTech, the Guardian Cap performed well in the NFL testing.
“A statistical analysis of the weighted results indicated that helmets outfitted with these add-ons exhibited statistically significant improvements (on average 9% for the Guardian Cap NXT and 5% for the ProTech) over the bare helmets,” the NFL findings said in a memo. “Additional helmet-to-helmet impact testing was conducted to investigate interactions when add-on devices were attached to both helmets. Results from centric (direct) and eccentric (glancing) impacts indicated that head impact severity was reduced in all conditions in which a Guardian Cap NXT was present on one or both helmets.”
As a result, the NFLPA approved the use of Guardian Caps on NFL practice fields. Since then, 12 franchises have implemented the caps.
While the Guardian Cap has now spread from high schools to college programs to the NFL, the implementation of a soft-shelled cover for a helmet isn’t necessarily new to the University of Oklahoma.
Sooners head athletic trainer Scott Anderson said OU has a rich history of utilizing such a cover to protect players.
“Actually Oklahoma has a long history of externally padded shells on helmets,” Anderson said. “It really dates back into probably the 1950s or something like that. You know, there was a padded external padded shell on our practice helmets. Occasionally a player would even wear one in a game.
“With some of the shifting of helmet manufacturers along probably about the 1980s, those type of helmets were no longer made and so Oklahoma quit using external padding. Again, some years ago, (Guardian Caps) became an option.”
Though Anderson couldn't recall the exact year the Sooners began to employ the Guardian Cap in practice, it's been a few years, at least since 2018, that Oklahoma has utilized them in practice.
Anderson said that while the science surrounding concussions and sub-concussive hits is still evolving, the Guardian Cap is one of many options the Sooners and other programs have implemented to try to mitigate the injury risks as much as possible.
“Yeah, (we’re) just kind of trying to do the most that we can, so to speak, to offer some margin of protection where we can with an understanding that there are risks or harm associated with,” Anderson said. “If you follow some of the changes that have been made to college preseason, the focus as much as anything is reducing impacts across the board. That really is the number one focus and it’s certainly ours.
“And then within that, there are going to be impacts. And if and when there are impacts, even though hopefully mitigated, what’s the best margin we can accomplish? And this is a reasonable option for us in that regard.”
Though there are no immediate plans to roll out the Guardian Cap over hard-shelled helmets on an actual game day, Anderson said the evolution of helmet research and technology will continue to bring changes to the protection offered on the field.
“There has been probably as much science and research into (helmets) over the last few years than there has been really over any period of time,” Anderson said. “And so I think they will change. One manufacturer has a helmet out right now that is touted as designed for a lineman.
“I think the realization (is) that different positions have different impacts and forces. I think probably more likely that helmets will become a little bit more position-specific as opposed to some general fix.”
Oklahoma running backs coach DeMarco Murray instructing running back Tre Bradford during an open practice
John E. Hoover / SI Sooners
Anderson didn’t rule out a college football future where soft-shelled helmets are utilized on game day, as the helmet is ever-evolving.
“The hard shell is going under and has gone under some change and evolution as well,” he said. “Recent generations of helmet have some flex or points of flex or something like that to them. It’s not an unforgivable plastic bubble or whatever anymore.”
For Guardian’s money, they aren’t focused on making the soft shell a fixture on game days, for now.
“By and large,” Hanson said, “we know that the pageantry of football is that you’ve got your decaled helmet on game day. But if we can lessen the severity of all of the sub-concussive hits that they take in preseason, that they take during the week in practice, we feel like that has a beneficial effect.
“Our whole focus is getting them healthy to game day.”
Now that they’ve made it to the NFL and provide protection to over 100,000 athletes nationwide, Hanson said her goal is to ensure that they are doing what they can to make a difference in youth football.
“There was research a couple of years ago from Purdue that said before these changes took place, the average high school lineman took 1,100 to 1,500 hits every season,” she said. “That’s a lot of hits within a couple months period.”
As a result, Hanson said that Guardian is doing what they can, going as far as to donate caps to Texas high school football and other states around the country, to try to mitigate those hits on youth football players all across the country whose brains are still developing.
Guardian has also invested in other sports, such as lacrosse, and has even invested in progressive turf technology that also has the aim of reducing impacts.
For now, next time the Sooners release a camp video on Twitter, fans can rest easy knowing the program is doing what it can to keep its athletes as healthy as possible.
“I don’t know that we were visionaries,” Hanson said. “I just don’t think that anybody took the ball and ran with it.”
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