Stefan Fatsis » In the NFL, Playing Safety Doesn’t Mean a Lot of Padding

In the NFL, Playing Safety Doesn’t Mean a Lot of Padding

The Wall Street Journal
December 23, 2004

By Stefan Fatsis

EARTH CITY, Mo.—In the rear of a storage room, at the back of a shelf, 12 feet off the ground, in three sealed boxes, are the hip pads of the St. Louis Rams.

From the top of a ladder, equipment manager Todd Hewitt ripped open a box and tossed down a white, cross-shaped pad made of foam. “The last time I bought these was 1996 or ‘97,” he said.

In the National Football League, the hip pad is dead. So are the tailbone pad, the elbow pad and the forearm pad. The thigh pad and the knee pad are endangered species. The size of shoulder pads is shrinking by the season.

NFL players, who once lumbered around the field weighed down by head-to-toe padding, now wear less protective gear than at any time since the early 1900s, when football was in its infancy. “I think they’d wear nothing if they could,” says Rams head coach Mike Martz. Cleveland Browns equipment manager Bob Monica says he’s given up trying to convince millionaire players that it’s in their interest to wear full padding. “Talking to these guys is like talking to a wall,” he says.

The depadding of the NFL is part machismo, part peer pressure and part vanity. Tactics also have changed. The NFL is focused on speed, not just in-the-trenches toughness, and passing has superseded the ground game as the predominant offensive weapon. A player wearing a two-ounce knee pad the size of a coaster thinks he’s at a disadvantage competing against someone who is not.

The result is a faster, higher-scoring game that mirrors the revved-up version of the NFL found in videogames. It also better suits players competing for attention in a sport saturated by media coverage.

“When you’re on TV, millions of people see you,” says Dane Looker, a Rams wide receiver. “You don’t want to look sloppy out there.” Before the season, Mr. Looker had the sleeves on his jersey sewn tighter to better show off his biceps.

Even stegosaurus-sized linemen who mostly block and tackle want to feel dainty. Rams rookie Brian Howard, a 278-pound defensive lineman, didn’t ask for thigh or knee pads when he made the team. “How many times have I gotten a bruise in that little square area [around the knee]?” he asks. As many as three-quarters of the league’s 1,700 players use little protection beyond the required helmet and shoulder pads, equipment managers estimate.

A pad reduces the chance of injury by dispersing the impact of a blow over its entire surface area. Thigh pads, which are especially effective, contain three shock-absorbing bumps on a plastic shell surrounded by vinyl-nitrile foam.

Trainers think smaller shoulder pads may be behind an increase in torn rotator cuffs. They also suggest that players may be tearing posterior cruciate ligaments after jolting padless kneecaps. But the NFL’s comprehensive data don’t show an increase in injuries to padless places. Even if they did, officials say, a rash of thigh bruises would be a low priority in a league facing health issues including the long-term effects of multiple concussions.

“I can’t look a player in the eye and say, `Do you know what will happen to you if you don’t wear [a thigh or knee pad]?’ “ says Dave Halstead, director of the Sports Biomechanics Impact Research Lab at the University of Tennessee and an equipment consultant to the NFL players’ union.

As a result, neither the NFL nor the union wants to force players to wear pads. Elliot Pellman, chairman of the New York Jets’ medical department and the NFL’s medical liaison to its 32 teams, says that while common sense suggests wearing pads, “we’re talking about man-days lost. We’re not talking about life or limb.”

Protective equipment dates to the 1890s, when the sport evolved from a derivative of soccer into a brutal contest in which players sometimes died. Early shoulder pads featured “small patches of leather-covered curled hair” sewn into jerseys, according to a Rawlings Sporting Goods Co. history. Protective jackets, pants and suits were reinforced with cane ribbing.

Over time, pads were added for specific body parts, such as kidney pads built into pants. As equipment technology advanced in the 1970s, new gear such as neck rolls, flak jackets and hand blockers — a rectangular pad that covered the hand and wrist — came into vogue.

A few NFL players decades ago eschewed certain padding to gain mobility. Mostly, though, pads were considered the embodiment of toughness. Gene Upshaw, a Hall of Fame offensive lineman for the Oakland Raiders between 1967 to 1981, doesn’t understand why players these days don’t wear pads but says it’s a personal choice. Mr. Upshaw, who now heads the players’ union, has a picture on his office wall of his No. 1 nemesis, Kansas City Chiefs defensive lineman Buck Buchanan. “He’s taped from his fists all the way up to his elbow,” Mr. Upshaw says approvingly.

In 1995, the NFL changed hip, thigh and knee pads from “mandatory” to “recommended” equipment because so many players were stripping down that the earlier rule was considered unenforceable. A few NFL teams require players to wear thigh and knee pads but even on those teams, “there are transgressors,” says Ronnie Barnes, vice president for medical services for the New York Giants. Hip, thigh and knee pads are required in high-school and college games.

“Speed, man,” says Rams safety Antuan Edwards. “The game is so fast, you want to be as light as possible.” Mr. Edwards ditched leg pads when he entered the NFL five years ago. “You feel a difference,” he says. “At least you want to think you feel a difference.”

Showing off muscular, padless legs encased in spandex doesn’t hurt, either. “It does look good, doesn’t it?” says Mr. Edwards, smiling.

For the 47-year-old Mr. Hewitt, the Rams’ equipment manager, pads have been a life’s work. He has spent 27 seasons with the team and his father held the job before he did. Mr. Hewitt has watched with bewilderment as players opt for less padding. He says he tells them: “It’s your choice, but I don’t agree with it.”

In his storage room at the Rams’ suburban training complex, Mr. Hewitt maintains nine bins filled with pads that players actually use, which are mostly very small. Seven contain youth models, designed for kids aged 14 years and under. The other two hold small-adult sizes. At the back, a dozen bins hold larger pads, such as the T-88 Big Boy, the Hummer of thigh pads, made by Adams USA Inc., which no Ram has donned in a decade.

A few Rams wear a standard adult thigh pad, a 6-by-9-inch model that weighs five ounces. Most go for a 5-by-7-inch junior one. Also popular is Adams’s 4-by-5-inch PWT-47 Pee Wee Thigh Guard. “We sell a lot of those to the NFL,” says John Bartlett, an Adams sales manager who deals with more than 20 NFL teams.

Even that’s too bulky for some players, who strip away the pad’s foam exterior and just wear the thin plastic shell. Adams and other companies now ship the pads without foam to meet demand.

Mr. Hewitt says rookies often request a full complement of pads and quickly return the gear after getting ridiculed in practice. One ex-Ram tried a new, oversized helmet that promised extra protection. He traded it in, Mr. Hewitt says, when teammates said he looked like “that little dude on `The Flintstones,’ “ the Great Gazoo.

In the locker room, Mr. Hewitt stopped at the stall of Blaine Saipaia, a 330-pound offensive lineman. “Here’s his thigh pad,” Mr. Hewitt said in disbelief, holding up a small yellow plastic shell from an Adams JV-70 Junior Thigh Guard. It’s less than a sixteenth of an inch thick.

Mr. Saipaia says the tiny pads make him feel lighter and freer, “like you’re wearing shorts out there.” Plus, he says, no matter what protection players wear, it’s football. “You’re still running into people,” he says. “So it’s going to hurt.”

In the NFL, Playing Safety Doesn’t Mean a Lot of Padding

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