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Oregon Ducks head coach Mark Helfrich is easy to talk with, UO athletic trainers say, about making changes to his practice routine if it keeps the Ducks healthier.

(Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian)

EUGENE – When Kim Terrell learned the NCAA's Football Rules Committee had proposed a rule to prohibit snapping the ball within 10 seconds under the guise of player safety, the Oregon associate director for athletic medicine wasn't sold.

“They’re talking about fatigue as causing injuries,” said Terrell, who has worked with uptempo offenses ever since its arrival at UO in 2007, “that’s baloney. That would mean that every fourth quarter everybody’s collapsing and falling down from being hurt and that’s not happening.

“This is illogical to me, I can’t even wrap my brain around how this is a real safety issue.”

Since the proposal was recommended two weeks ago, it has prompted a firestorm of opinions from nearly every corner of the sport about how its potential passage could dramatically change the game. In the weeks since, however, its credibility as a player safety issue has drawn fierce opposition in lieu of any supporting data, and the critics include Pac-12 athletic trainers who say real results would come not from a 10-second rule but another change to kickoffs and NCAA-wide legislation about hitting in practice.

In the case of the latter, Terrell and Kevin Steil, UO’s associate director of athletic medicine who oversees football, believe the Ducks’ practice habits could be a national model as much as their offense is at the center of the 10-second discussion.

“Baseball is eliminating home plate collisions, but how often does that happen?” said Randy Cohen, a University of Arizona athletic trainer and the chairman of the college committee of the National Athletic Trainers Association, which Terrell also sits on. “At football practice those hits occur every single day.”

The 10-second rule’s fate will be decided March 6 via a conference call meeting of the 11 members of the NCAA’s Playing Rules Oversight Panel, all of whom declined to comment for this article. In an email, an NCAA spokesman wrote that the panel will judge the proposal on three criteria: “student-athlete safety, financial concerns and a negative impact on the image of the game.”

"We don't have any data that it would decrease injury," said Cohen, whose duties include working with Arizona coach Rich Rodriguez, a pioneer of fast-paced offenses. Steil, Terrell and even rules committee chairman Troy Calhoun – the Roseburg native and Air Force coach – have all agreed that there is no data linking hurry-up offenses with increased defensive injuries.

Though trainers concede football’s inherent risks cannot be legislated out of the game completely, both Terrell and Steil strongly applauded the targeting rule that went into practice last season and also suggest a two-prong approach of altering kickoffs – which were already altered in 2012 to increase touchbacks -- and practices.

Steil said 43 percent of concussions suffered by Oregon players in 2013 came during games, which is about normal compared to previous seasons.

“You definitely have a lot more practices than you have games so for 43 percent of them to come from game situations means there’s something going on in that game that’s different than practice,” Terrell said. “If you really want to make football safer you don’t need 10 seconds after a play, you need to change how kickoffs are run.”

In 2012 kickoffs were moved up from the 30- to the 35-yard line and the rate of touchbacks doubled; none of the three trainers offered ideas for how a new kickoff rule would work, however.

Inside Oregon’s closed practices, the Ducks have not tackled to the ground since 2009, when Chip Kelly became head coach, because it allows for more repetitions. In addition several, but not all, Oregon players have worn accelerometers in practices and games inside their pads since 2012 that allow trainers to monitor a player’s location, workload and measurements such as peak speed. According to invoices, Oregon pays $5,400 every three months for the service, which is provided by the Australian company Catapult. That does not include other fees for the subscription.

(Though Oregon has worn them for two years, other Pac-12 schools debuted similar accelerometers this season in a pilot program.)

If the data from the accelerometers shows a potential problem over the course of the season, trainers say it can act like a canary in a coal mine for a future injury. Terrell and Steil each said UO coaches have been open to modifying drills to lessen injuries.

Practices still pose many risks for players because of the sheer number of them and the misnomer that practices in “shells” – helmets and shoulder pads – are not full-contact. Cohen said Arizona players often complain more from “shell” practices, because heads are hit more often.

A 2012 study by Purdue’s Neurotrama Group in high school players over the course of two seasons found that players received between 200 and 1,900 direct hits to the head each season, some with a g-force that is similar to a car crash.

“Limited equipment is just taking your thigh pads off,” Terrell said. “That doesn’t, in my mind, really change very much about how you practice. You’re still involving your upper extremity in everything that you do.”

That model is one reason why when the Pac-12 announced last summer that it would limit schools to two “full-contact” practices per week, Oregon shrugged due to its prior self-imposed approach to full-contact hitting. UO also keeps medical records for each player tracking in minute detail where and how an injury occurred, from games to practices, including the type of drill to trace patterns.

Members of the National Athletic Trainers Association and the American Football Coaches Association say the defensive-substitution rule change was proposed without any debate or input outside of a handful of advocates.

“This is completely anecdotal but talking to trainers in the Pac-12 if you want to talk about safety, I can get significantly more beat up playing Stanford than playing Oregon,” said Cohen, the Arizona trainer. “With two tight ends, a 250-pound fullback barreling down on guys, run blocking is the one that gets your guys thrown into other guys' knees. That's the one that gets you versus playing Oregon, where you have this great quarterback who gets a snap and quickly throws the ball. The offensive and defensive line is engaged less in that offense.

“You know that from Oregon, they get up to the line fast and then they look to the sideline. It's not about time, time won't decrease plays, and it won't allow more rest. It will allow the defense to substitute more but we don’t have any data that it would decrease injury.

“And we have to base everything on data.”