Partnering For Safety – Florida Gators

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Sometimes when one of Billy Napier‘s players is in his office, they’ll take notice of the helmet displayed on a shelf. Napier wore it as a quarterback at Furman nearly a quarter-century ago. The Florida coach will toss it their way. 
 
“Check it out,” he says. 
 
What the player notices is there wasn’t much to the inner-workings of college football helmet, circa 2001, which is why Napier is so candid with his players about his concussion history – “Had several of ’em, actually,” he says – and why the latest data on player safety has a vital role in the day-to-day operations of the University of Florida program. 

Some of the data, not yet made public, were eye-opening. The conclusions, however, were not. 

 

“The sooner a player reports concussions symptoms, the sooner they’ll likely get back on the field,” Dr. Allen Sills said. 

 

Sills is the National Football League’s chief medical officer. A professor of neurological surgery as well as founder and co-director of the Vanderbilt Sports Concussion Center, he’s one of the preeminent names in all of sports medicine, which made his visit last week to the Heavener Football Training Complex – and his “Innovations to Make the Game Safer Presentation” – a must-see event and fountain of information for Napier, his coaches, support staff and Gators’ sports medicine personnel.

 

“The NFL is on the cutting edge of player safety and we always try to stay on top of that,” said Paul Silvestri, senior director of sports health and performance for UF football. “To have these kinds of discussions with someone as impressive as Dr. Sills, I can’t put a value on it.”

 

The NFL has implemented a slew of rules changes this decade in the name of player safety, including two high-profile alterations last week; one that will make kickoff returns both more viable as game-changing plays while also reducing risk of high-speed collisions and another banning a dangerous tackling technique known as “hip-drop” that resulted in lower body injuries 6.5 percent of the time it was used last season. 

 

The changes were finalized during the NFL owners meetings in Orlando, after which Sills zipped up the Turnpike to check in with the Gators as part of UF’s partnership in the NFL/NCAA Research Consortium. 

 

UF, along with Vandy and the universities of Georgia and Pittsburgh, joined the consortium in 2022, a year after the universities of Alabama, North…