Risk of getting a concussion or severe head injury by helmet to helmet hit in the NFL

Football is known to be a hard hitting sport and its spectators claim that those who play it already know the risks. One of the major injuries in football is a concussion or severe head injury which can lead to paralysis or fatality hence ending their career. This has been a big issue in the past years the National Football League and many solutions have been brought up to avoid these injuries. Every season the NFL introduces new rules outlining proper ways to hit in order to avoid certain injuries. Although these rules are introduced, concussions and other head injuries are still increasing by each football season. It is therefore important to understand the basis of this risk by performing an analysis and understanding its probabilities and consequences.
The purpose of this project is performing a risk analysis of the underlying issue and come up with mitigation action. First the decision is identified, in this case, helmet to helmet hit or an illegal hit as defined by the NFL. The undesired outcome of this decision is players having concussions or severe head injuries while others even end up getting paralyzed. A risk avoidance or mitigation action will then be taken. The project will include statistical data available from numerous sources provided by the NFL and other independent studies. These data sets will be used in analysis from a set number of seasons. Methods of analysis such as cause effect, fault tree analysis and probabilistic risk assessment will be used in the risk analysis. All the data, summary metrics and computational results will be provided in the end and alternative models will be provided for easy comparison.
The project is feasible because there are multiple sources such statistical data and other graphical data available. There is enough information available to create risk assessment metrics and other calculations in order to accomplish the project’s objectives. The objective being creating an awareness of the severity of helmet to helmet hit by showing the risks involved using various analytical methods and coming up with a mitigation or avoiding the risk in general.

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