The NFL’s newest innovation competition will seek ideas to improve the protectiveness of facemasks. Commissioner Roger Goodell announced the mission of the annual HealthTech Challenge with $100,000 of available funding from the stage of the Super Bowl LX Innovation Summit presented by YouTube.
While the protective material and designs of the padding and shells of helmets have accelerated dramatically in recently years, changes to the facemask have been “negligible,” said NFL EVP Jeff Miller, who oversees player health and safety.
The charge of this contest is a direct result of on-field data from the 2025 season indicating that 44% of in-game concussions included a direct blow to the facemask, an increase from 29% a decade ago.
“These are showing up as a percentage of all concussions with greater and greater frequency,” Miller told SBJ. “As a result, we thought that it’s time for us to focus on this aspect of helmet innovation. We knew we would get to this day, and we think that we can make a lot of improvements.”
The scope of possible new ideas is wide and can relate to:
- The material of the facemask
- Its shape
- How it connects to the rest of the helmet
- The spacing between the face and facemask, or even
- How the chin strap holds the helmet in place
“You could see a different looking overall structure depending on the capabilities and the shape of the submission of the facemask,” Miller said. “I would hope that we would see all those things.”
Innovations can be either universal -- i.e. compatible with all helmets -- or for a specific brand or model. Miller noted that the Riddell Axiom is the only helmet to rethink how the facemask attaches to the shell and show an appreciable benefit to the player.
The HealthTech Challenges are run collaboratively between the NFL and the NFLPA, with the league’s Football Research Inc., which uses the Biocore lab under Jeff Crandall, and the union’s partner, Duke Biomedical Engineering, run by Dr. Barry Myers.
Crowdsourcing innovation has been effective for the league across a number of fronts such as the Big Data Bowl analytics contests, computer vision challenges with AWS to several avenues of health and safety around helmets and playing field surfaces. Miller noted that the rate of change for helmet design is nine times greater than it used to be; the top-performing helmets in safety testing from years ago are no longer protective enough to be allowed on the field.
“Running these challenges has led to new materials, has led to an entirely new helmet company -- when Vicis won this years ago -- and has led to structures that have been licensed or purchased by some of the helmet companies so that they’ve advanced their helmets over the years,” Miller said. “So we’ve had a great deal of success with this, and it’s fair to say that we’re really optimistic that we’re going to see something interesting come from this in the next few months.”
