Lucky Deignan had never worn a soft helmet cover like a Guardian Cap before coming to play football at MIT. And the senior defensive back admits he wasn’t into it when he first had a chance to wear what looks like a mix between a pillow and a shower cap.
“My initial reaction was like, 'I don’t know.’ They were just kind of ugly,” Deignan admitted with a chuckle.
The caps are an extra layer of padding that goes over the helmet. They’re designed to help reduce the impact of hits to the head. The gear has become a more common sight across football over the last few years. The NFL started to allow players to wear them in games last season.
Like his teammate, MIT senior defensive lineman Stephen Schulze said players at his position weren’t initially thrilled with the caps, either.
“And a lot of it, on the line, is you get a lot of the 'pop’ when you hit helmets — which, maybe objectively, [is] not a good thing,” he said. “But it’s part of the appeal. Everyone loves feeling that kind of contact. And with the Guardian Caps it’s a lot softer and you don’t hear it.”
Despite some of that initial hesitancy, every Engineer walked onto the field for games this season with a helmet draped in the black padded covering, and the word “Tech” emblazoned on the side in cursive. That’s what they’ll be wearing tonight for MIT’s regular season finale at home against Norwich University.
It’s a piece of equipment that may become more widely used as research continues into its effectiveness — including from at least one of the players on the current team.
Changing trends
Head coach Brian Bubna said MIT started giving players the option to use the caps in practice a few years ago. Coaches decided to mandate them at practice midway through last year. Some of the players had already started to wear them during games.
“And then this year we said, 'You know what? We’re all gonna wear them in the games,'” he said. “Practice, games — we wear them all the time.”
Now the caps are as much a part of MIT’s uniform as cleats, gloves and shoulder pads.
Bubna said many teams are already wearing caps at practice — but not necessarily in games, too. In fact, he says he can’t think of another program that has a similar blanket policy that every player wear the caps in-game for the full season.
“If it protects you in practice, then why all of a sudden on gameday would you say, ‘Well, I want to have less protection on gameday,’ when the action is probably more intense?” Bubna said. “And we’re really going live, tackling to the ground, which is something you don’t really do during the week once you get out of preseason.”
The team has two sets of caps: one for practice and one for games. The gameday covers have more of traditional feel to them with the “Tech” decal on the side. Bubna said the equipment staff had to use a hair dryer to make the adhesive stronger so they wouldn’t come off.
Now the caps are normal for the Engineers. Even if opposing teams think it may make them look a little funny.
It’s something players like Schulze have heard about from their opponents, usually with some trash-talk about being “soft.”
“Oh yeah, the number of times we’d get chirped at least at the O-line/D-line level is all the time,” he said. “Especially last year when they were, like, new.”
Mixed reviews
For all the talk about the safety the Guardian Caps may provide, the scientific conclusions about their effectiveness is mixed. The company’s website reads, “No helmet, practice apparatus, or helmet pad can prevent or eliminate the risk of concussions or other serious head injuries while playing sports.”
The same page advises that the product be used as part of an overall safety strategy.
Bubna says the MIT athletics staff are regularly updating their helmets to ones with the highest safety ratings. And he said the coaching staff have seen a downward trend in head injuries, based on their day-to-day observations.
And after all, this is MIT, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the team consists of players with the skills needed to examine these topics. For example, Schulze, the defensive lineman, studies biomechanical engineering — and has done research on the caps, an effort that he hopes can help document their potential impact.
“That’s definitely what I want to be able to do at the end of this,” he said. “Just got to get there first.”
In the meantime, Bubna doesn’t plan to get rid of the additional headgear. And across the sport, he thinks they’ll only become more common.
“I think you’ll probably see in the next five years a lot more people wearing them,” he said.
