As fans and players alike gear up for Super Bowl XLV this Sunday in Arlington, Texas where the Green Bay Packers will face off against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Mike Oliver, the executive director of the National Operating Committee on Sports Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE), wants to make one "fundamental fact" very clear. "No football helmet can prevent all concussions," he says.

In a press release today, NOCSAE urges parents and athletes to "get the facts right about football helmets and concussion protection." NOCSAE, an independent and non-profit standard-setting body, has developed sophisticated performance and standard tests for football helmets and facemasks, as well as other sports, and is a leader in scientific research to understand concussions and head injury.

Oliver spoke in length with Technology Review yesterday, and said, "any claim that is made with regard to concussions that is not based in fact or science is potentially very damaging." Tom Udall (D-New Mexico) is asking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate "misleading safety claims and deceptive practices" in the selling of new football helmets and reconditioned used ones. Oliver says he has talked with Udall and is encouraging the investigation. The difficulty, he explains, is that in the last five to eight years helmet designs have changed but performance has not. "Companies can promote their helmets as being better for reducing concussions, but we know from the test data that all the helmets [on the market] are nearly identical [in performance]."

Oliver adds that while it is fair for the companies to say that the helmet addresses concussions at some level, the problem is scientist don't know how much they actually need to reduce the accelerations of the head to reduce concussions. "There is a lot about concussions and head injury that researchers don't fully understand," said Joseph Maroon, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center and the team neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers, in a recent interview with Technology Review.

In the last decade the most significant finding in concussion research, says Oliver, is identifying that head injury is caused not just by linear accelerations, movement of the head back and forth in a straight line, but rotational acceleration, which causes the head to rotate or twist. "The brain is very sensitive to torque, some scientists think this also causes tension between the brain and brain stem," says Oliver.

The next step is to be able to define thresholds for rotational force. Current NOCSAE helmet safety tests only test for side and front impacts (below, bottom video), and linear accelerations (below, top video).

NOCSAE recently awarded three grants to study concussions: one for a project to better model the brain; another for a study to improve testing protocols; and the last to study rotational acceleration. Also, Riddell, a sports equipment manufacturing, and owner of the HIT technology--a system that employs sensor-equipped helmets to measure the location, magnitude, and direction of hits experienced during a game or practice--is working with researchers and the NFL to build new sensors that can better analyze hits. The NFL plans to use the system to study impacts in the 2011 football season.

Concussions in football is a "complex issue," says Oliver, and "it won't be until we can really understand the injury that we can build better helmet technology." He's confident that will happen, soon.

On Sunday the National Football League holds its championship game, Super Bowl XLIV. It will be the first Super Bowl since the league acknowledged the link between mild head trauma--often caused by the game's rough style of play--and long-term brain damage, and overhauled its policies toward concussions. As many football fans may have noticed, players this season were more likely to remain on the bench than return to the field after a blow to the head, thanks to new rules forbidding them from playing after showing significant signs of concussion.

That change has been a long time coming, writes Deborah Blum in an Op-Ed today in The New York Times. While brain injury in football players has seen a growing emphasis in recent years--both in the media and in Congress--strong evidence for the link has been around for more than 80 years. In the piece, Blum describes a paper published in The Journal of the American Medical Association on October 13, 1928. "This raises the question--at least for me--as to why we are announcing the athlete concussion-dementia link as a new, and still somewhat debatable, issue some 80 years later," she writes.

In that study, performed by Dr. Harrison Martland, chief medical examiner in Essex, NJ,

Martland did autopsies on more than 300 people who had died of head injuries, looking for patterns of brain damage. For his study of boxers, he talked a fight promoter into giving him a list of 23 former fighters he thought could be labeled as definitely punch drunk. Martland was able to track down only 10 of the former athletes, but in those cases, he found the promoter's diagnosis was on target. Four were in asylums, suffering from dementia. Two had difficulty forming sentences or responding to questions. One was almost blind, two had trouble walking and one had developed symptoms similar to those of Parkinson's disease.

More recently,

Surveys done in the last few years have found that N.F.L. players are at higher risk of dementias and other mental disorders than the general population. Autopsies of athletes -- notably the brains of former N.F.L. players who suffered from profound dementias -- consistently found dark clusters of nerve cell proteins, formations more common to elderly Alzheimer's patients. Similar patterns of damage were recently reported in wrestlers and soccer players. Most of these athletes were dead by age 50."

...At a Congressional hearing on football brain injuries, held in Houston on Monday, legislators accused college athletic officials of ignoring risks and failing to adopt polices that sufficiently protected young players. "It's money, money, money," said Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, "and health care ought to be considered."

Researchers are working hard to develop better ways to study the problem, including helmets designed to detect concussions, which would alert players or coaches when they need to be benched, or even prevent them. And new ways to study mild traumatic brain injury, which doesn't show up in traditional brain scans.

This year's Sports Analytics Conference, held by MIT's Sloan School of Management, drew a great crowd (as it did last year), and not just because Ray Allen, the Boston Celtics All Star guard, and Mark Cuban, entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, were present. Front-office executives stole the show as they discussed potential strategies for gathering and analyzing data on such things as a player's passion, defense skills, and team chemistry, as well as on the fan experience.

Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets and conference co-chair, kicked off the first panel, "Evolution of the Fan Experience," by reminding people that "it's during these tough [economic] times that the most sports innovation happens." Brian Burke, president and general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, discussed some of these innovations--seats embedded with screens that let fans pick the content that they want to watch, and text-messaging systems that let fans poll during an event. "It's all about content and delivery," said Burke. Overall, he said that the challenge is building an infrastructure that incorporates gadgets and devices that bring fans off the couch and to the venue. It's focusing on the "points of contact" from the time the fan leaves her house until she gets back home, added Mark Donovan, senior vice president of business operations for the Philadelphia Eagles.

Burke also made it clear during the panel that fighting, which he encourages in his players, is essential to the historical roots of hockey, not just a money driver. Jeff Van Gundy, an ESPN analyst and former NBA head coach, could not agree more. "Sportsmanship is overrated, and [NBA] players have turned into a bunch of softies," he said, and he thinks this is a reason that the NBA is missing out on rivalries, especially in playoffs. "The crowds are passive and the players are too friendly. They rip each other during the game and then are hugging afterwards!"

But how do teams find the next big superstar--the one who not only wins championships, but also draws the fans? The New England Patriots, one of the most analytically advanced franchises, has been known for its unique scouting system. "The Patriots have coaches and scouts work together: every position coach has to explain to scouts exactly what he is looking for. Is it going to be an All-American or a Matt Cassel?" said Jack Mula, general counsel for ScoutAdvisor, who previously worked for the Patriots.

While coaches and staff can judge a player by his numbers, it is still difficult to measure the intangibles--passion, heart, personality, and team chemistry, to name just a few. But Mike Forde, performance director at Chelsea Football Club, said that measuring the intangibles has changed, especially for soccer, where the mechanics of the league (the English Premier League recruits across 25 leagues) are now more international. "Bringing impartiality to a subjective area has to be done analytically."

Yet there is not a spreadsheet for hard work and good personality, said Aaron Shatz, founder of Football Outsiders. "The intangibles are important, and we just don't have numbers for that."

Dean Oliver, director of quantitative analysis for the Denver Nuggets, has a different take: "If you want to study one thing, you have to ask what it is. Heart? What is the evidence of it? By breaking down its parts is how you make what is intangible tangible. You have to turn words into numbers and numbers into words. If someone says that player is good or bad, there is a mathematical set of equations."

Not even Bill James, the pioneer of statistical analysis in the most statistically advanced sport (baseball), has yet to find a spreadsheet with the answers. "Everyone is looking for that secret sauce," said Cuban. In basketball, "no one shares because there are no standards."

Unlike baseball, team-oriented sports like basketball, football, and soccer are faced with an even tougher challenge. "Events are not as discrete in football as they are in baseball. You cannot just drop a hitter in a lineup even if his style is different," said Shatz. "It's not enough to say the player is talented; he has to fit the team's scheme. Plus, there are just so many positions that don't have statistics."

Even though baseball is farther along in quantifying performance--the league has now turned its sights to measuring defense skills--there is still a lot of unused data, said Oliver. "The key is to find the right data to analyze, and there is variability on how people do this."

"You don't want to let the other team know what you are doing," said Mike Zarren, assistant executive director of basketball operations and associate counsel for the Boston Celtics.

The conference wrapped up with a panel called "The Value of Icon Players." The panelists agreed that there is not a price you can put on a player that transcends his or her sport, and data doesn't have to tell you who such an icon player is. "That person knows who he or she is as well as the team, but in the locker room, it's not talked about," said Allen.

In this video experts on a panel called "Basketball Analytics" including Morey, Cuban, Zarren and Oliver, discussed ways to quantify sports.