Football is a game of simple physics: One player has a ball, and many other players who do not have the ball want to stop him in his tracks. Sometimes this interaction happens at high speed. Speeds so fast that the parties involved bang into each other with a G force equivalent to a bowling ball being dropped on a head from 8 feet high.

Football is a beautifully violent game, which is the reason Americans simultaneously exalt and fear the sport. It’s the reason people cheer when a cornerback makes the tackle or a linebacker pummels his opponent. It’s also the reason that one out of every three players in the NFL will experience some form of brain trauma during his career. According to an investigation from Frontline, there have been nearly 200 concussions so far this NFL season, and those are just the concussions that were officially reported.

The NFL has a very real head injury problem. And after years of outright denial, the organization has finally begun to acknowledge its culpability through payouts, research grants around traumatic brain injuries, and initiatives like the Head Health Challenge, which gives grants to companies working on advancements in football-related head health. One of those grant recipients was Vicis. Now, the Seattle company has designed a new, flexible helmet called the Zero1 it believes can reduce the chances of a player sustaining a concussion.

Football players have always worn some form of protective head gear. Before the plastic boom of the 1950s, helmets were made from leather and looked like aviator caps. It wasn’t until the 1970s that helmets included energy-absorbing foam to help mitigate the traumatic effects of impact. But helmet design hasn’t evolved much in the past forty years; today's headgear is marked by a stiff outer shell and padded interior that’s meant to prevent skull fractures and brain hemorrhages.

“Helmets were never intended to prevent concussions,” says Sam Browd, a pediatric neurosurgeon and a cofounder of Vicis. Unlike fractures, a concussion is a more nuanced injury whose detrimental side effects are still being investigated. What we do know is that it occurs, generally, when a person sustains an impact that causes the untethered brain to jostle and its tissue to strain. Doctors in the field like to use the phrase, “if you’ve seen one concussion, you’ve seen one concussion,” which is a clever way of saying no one knows exactly what causes a concussion.

But researchers have been busy collecting insights. They know, for instance, that it’s probably a force-related event, and that rotational forces—a glancing blow, for example—are more likely to cause a concussion than head-on collisions. Still, no two concussions are the same, which makes it nearly impossible to design a perfect solution. “What we’re really trying to do is take this common sense approach to it,” Browd says. “The more force reduction you can bring, the more likely you are to reduce the risk of concussion.”

Artefact

Vicis’s helmet borrows ideas from the automotive industry, which has used plastic bumpers and crumple zones as protective measures for decades. “It’s a very challenging engineering problem,” Browd says. “Instead of trying to slow a car down over many feet or yards, we’re trying to slow these impacts down over 2.5 inches.” The Zero1, which was designed with the help of Seattle design studio Artefact, revolves around a multilayered system that begins with a flexible outer shell made from a bendable plastic and ends with an inner shell and liner that are meant to provide a more customized fit around the head.

Beneath the outer shell is the core layer, which is comprised of hundreds of flexible columns that act like shock absorbers. This layer is the heart of the Vicis helmet, and was developed with the help of Per Reinhall, head of the University of Washington’s mechanical engineering department and a co-founder of Vicis. The columns, which vary in length and thickness depending on their position in the helmet, are made from a resilient polymer that bends in any given direction when compressed.

Vicis CEO Dave Marver explains that, upon impact, the columns transform from an I shape to a C, and then snap back into place in milliseconds. This, he claims, slows the acceleration of force before it reaches the player’s head. “Newton’s second law,” he says. “Force equals mass times acceleration. The mass of a player's not going to change, but if you can slow acceleration—the "a" in the equation—you’re reducing force.”

Here's an elementary physics metaphor to help you understand: The brain is like an egg yolk. Typical helmets will prevent the egg from cracking, but they won’t necessarily stop the yolk from breaking inside the shell. The Zero1’s core layer is meant to act like bubble wrap, so when the egg (your head) does hit something hard, the majority of the force will be redistributed. Other companies like Bell are tackling this same problem with a technology called MIPS, or multi-directional impact protection system. Its version of Vicis' core layer uses a rotating layer inside the helmet, which allows the head to move with the impact, ultimately displacing some of energy the brain would otherwise absorb.

Vicis says it's tested the helmet through drop tests (where the G-force of impact is measured by dropping a sensor-laden dummy head onto a fixed rubber anvil from varying heights) and a more sophisticated, rotational test where a moving pendulum strikes the helmet from the side. The company claims that, compared to other leading helmets from Riddell and Shutt, its helmet can reduce the force of impact by anywhere from 20 to 50 percent—a figure they say has been corroborated by third-party labs.

Tim Gay, a physics professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and author of The Physics of Football, says the helmet's principles work in theory, but there are few ways to know for certain without testing it on an actual player. “It’s very difficult to see ahead of time whether it’s going to work or not,” he says. “I appreciate that they’re trying to make the game safer, but I want to see the data they have.”

The company plans to test its helmet against Virginia Tech’s STAR rating, which measures a helmet’s ability to absorb impact and potential protect against concussions. If the Zero1 performs according to Vicis’ internal test, Browd is hopeful it will have a major impact on safety. He admits that it’s impossible to prevent all concussions, but he points to neurology literature that states a five percent reduction in force can translate to a 40 percent reduction in concussion risk. “If numbers end up panning out, we think we’re going to significantly improve the safety of the sport,” he says, adding: “I don’t think we’re reducing all force the head sees, but were reducing a substantial portion of the force that ends up being below the threshold that someone would sustain a concussion.”

Right now, Vicis doesn’t have any public contracts. The company has received more than $10 million in funding, with $500,000 coming from the NFL. The company's board is confident it won’t have any trouble selling the helmets (which at $1,500 are four- to five-times that of an average helmet) to NFL teams next season. Eventually the goal is to get the cost down enough that the helmet can be adopted by younger players—a demographic with which Browd, a pediatric neurosurgeon, is all too familiar.

Browd also has a five year-old, who he says has taken an interest in the sport. I asked if he'd consider letting his child play. “With current helmets, I’m not sure,” he says. “I think with the Vicis helmet, if we sustain the performance improvements we’re hoping to achieve, I would feel comfortable letting my son play because it puts the risk of the sport back towards the median.” Like any sport, football is never going to be 100 percent safe—but there’s still plenty of room to make it safer.