In this year’s Super Bowl, Philadelphia star offensive tackle Jordan Mailata is hoping a new generation of helmets will help keep him in the game — avoiding the same fate as Buffalo Bills cornerback Christian Benford, who was sidelined after suffering a concussion in the AFC Championship weeks ago.

“Headbutts are common, they’re going to happen,” Mailata said. “It’s what happens in the trenches.”

Neurosurgeon Dr. Allen Sills, chief medical officer for the NFL, is helping lead the effort to reduce concussions. 

“Some of the most common symptoms we see are headache or disorientation, perhaps problem with memory,” he said. “Sometimes people are a little bit unsteady. In rare instances, people can lose consciousness.”

Ten years ago, the league began teaming up with helmet manufacturers to try to build safer equipment.

“If you look at a helmet from say 20 years ago and compare it to today’s helmet, there’s several major changes. We have materials that do a better job at absorbing force and not transmitting that force to the brain,” Sills told CBS News. “We’ve got better padding inside there. It’s placed strategically within the helmet in different places based again on where we expect force to occur and how we want to minimize that force.”

Aside from improving equipment, the NFL has tried to reduce concussions by increasing player awareness and by changing certain rules, including starting teams closer to each other and farther downfield on kickoffs to lower the odds of high-speed collisions. 

“The headline coming out of the 2024 season is that 2024 saw the fewest number of concussions on record in the NFL,” Jeff Miller, who heads up health and safety for the league, said at a press conference last month.

In 2024, there were 182 concussions during practices and regular season games — a 17% drop compared to the previous season, which saw 219 in 2023. 

Neurologist Dr. Ann McKee is a pioneer in research showing that blows to the head — even ones that don’t cause concussions — can cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, leading to dementia. She said the NFL’s reported lower concussion rate is “terrific news.” 

“CTE risk is directly associated with number of playing years, how many hits you get and how hard those hits are,” she explained. 

McKee said that better helmet technology is “definitely helpful,” but the way the sport is played will always put people at risk. That’s especially true in youth sports, she said, noting that researchers have seen CTE in teens and young adults.  

“With what we understand today, we would say there is no concussion-proof helmet. And that’s why we can never say you’re putting on a better helmet, now you’re safer, go use your head any way you want to,” Sills said. “That’s the wrong message. Think of the helmets the way we do the airbags in our car or the antilock brakes. The best way to not get injured is to stay out of a crash in the first place.”