NFL Won’t Use Device Thought To Help Prevent Concussions

Businessweek

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-03-18/helmets-preventing-concussion-seen-quashed-by-nfl-riddell

With a device called ProCap, Bert Straus says he invented headgear that could reduce concussions in National Football League games. He never got the chance.

The ProCap, which took him eight years to develop, was gaining ground among players until he brought it before the NFL committee dealing with brain injuries. The panel disparaged Straus’s invention, prompting the league to warn players they risked death wearing it. The committee was guided in part by the advice of an outside consultant who once testified for Riddell Inc., the league’s official helmet maker, in an injury lawsuit.

Now the NFL and Riddell face lawsuits filed by more than 4,000 ex-players, including the family of San Diego Chargers standout Junior Seau, who committed suicide last May. The litigation focuses attention on Riddell’s helmets and whether the league covered up the sport’s long-term damage to players’ brains.

In Straus’s account of frustration and failure — exacerbated, he says, by the NFL’s relationship with Riddell — is a tale of a road that the NFL, a $9 billion-a-year business, may rue not taking. His story isn’t the only example of the NFL spurning a Riddell competitor. The league’s rebuffs of ProCap and other protective headgear raise the question of whether the NFL’s quarter-century alliance with Riddell helped stifle competition and innovation that might have reduced head injuries.