How To Clean A Xenith Football Helmet

What's Ahead for Football Helmet Tech

How an emphasis on safety is leading to a greater variety of helmets than ever before

This past weekend heralded the start of the new NFL season and — though my hometown team, the New England Patriots, was walloped by the Chiefs last Thursday in the season opener — there's a great deal that I'm excited about for the upcoming season. Beyond the standard storylines, such as the Pats' chances of a repeat and the Ezekiel Elliott suspension saga, I was particularly intrigued by the number of different helmets on display in the games this weekend. And not just from the traditional powerhouse helmet manufacturers like Riddell and Schutt — a substantial number of players sported helmets from smaller companies like Xenith and VICIS. Among the more notable players in season opener alone, Alex Smith, quarterback for the Chiefs, was wearing a Zero1 from VICIS (something that Michele Tafoya highlighted during a sideline segment) and Devin McCourty, safety for the Patriots, was sporting an Epic+ from Xenith. Lamar Miller and Jadaveon Clowney of the Houston Texans wore the Zero1 in last night's matchup against the Cincinnati Bengals as well.

Both Xenith, in Detroit, and VICIS, in Seattle, are attempting to change the paradigm by developing new ways to reduce the transfer of impact on a helmet to the head. And the NFL is taking steps in the right direction too, raising $60 million from owners for helmet research and starting a non-profit, Football Research, Inc. to develop safer equipment. The goal of the initiative is twofold: to develop better helmets and, further down the line, to develop specialized helmets for each position.

Helmets from the 2015 Army-Navy game, hand-painted with different ships for each positional group. In the future, customizing helmets based on position won't just be aesthetic—it'll also be for comfort, performance, and safety.

The idea of position-specific helmets fits with recent trends towards mass customization. Given modern advances in technology, we're starting to do away with the old ideas of 'one size fits all'; instead, we're getting closer to an era in which everyone will be able to have clothing or equipment made specifically for them.

Advances in technology — such as the development of mobile 3D scanning and additive manufacturing — will soon allow for the custom design and creation of protective equipment for players (from Pee Wee to Pro) on an individual basis. This is especially relevant in football: for example, an offensive lineman and a wide receiver have totally different responsibilities on the field, play using different actions, and are subject to different types of hits. A lineman might accumulate thousands of slower helmet-to-helmet hits over the course of a season battling in the trenches; although the wideout doesn't have to worry about those small hits, he does have to watch out for a few massive hits from a safety bearing down on him on a slant route. Or — to use the earlier example — as a highly-protected quarterback, Alex Smith will experience a hugely different set of head impacts each game when compared to Devin McCourty out in the deep middle of the field.

Alex Smith of the Kansas City Chiefs wearing a VICIS helmet, which has an outer shell, like a car bumper, designed to buckle inward to better absorb collision impacts.

These two players clearly need to be protected differently — and that's what position-specific helmets would do. By creating a helmet custom fit to a player based on both their position and unique head anatomy, you can account for the variation in how a player might get impacted as well as how that impact is absorbed by the head. Helmets will then truly be able to better protect athletes going forward. The end of "one size fits all" isn't just an aesthetic matter, focused on providing players with their own unique looks: it's also about designing equipment and gear that fits players better, to improve performance and increase safety. I'm hopeful that these trends will lead to better protection for players down the road as advanced methods are developed for customizing equipment for individual athletes — and, of course, I'm also hoping to see the Pats raise banner number six a year from now.