This project will look at the new rules put into place in the NFL and look at the effects. We will look at Four main topics about concussions and where the direction is going for concussions in the NFL; Concussions by State to see which teams posted the most concussions, Concussions by Position, Concussions by Week through the NFL Season, and Concussions over time. For the first three the source for the data was found here:https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/rishidamarla/concussions-in-the-nfl-20122014, the other final one is from this source found here:https://www.nfl.com/playerhealthandsafety/health-and-wellness/injury-data/injury-data. My thoughts are that the NFL changing the rule impacted the rate of concussions in a positive way. Here is the webiste that lists the new NFL rules by year https://operations.nfl.com/the-rules/rules-changes/health-safety-rules-changes/.

First we need to know what is a concussion?

What is a Concussion?

The CDC describes a concussion as, “A concussion is a type of traumatic brain injury—or TBI—caused by a bump, blow, or jolt to the head or by a hit to the body that causes the head and brain to move rapidly back and forth” [1]

CTE stands for Chronic traumatic encephalitic. It a progressive brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head or neck area. It causes accelerated brain deterioration in early age. This disease is commonly found in American Football professional athletes but also found in boxers as well. [2]

Symptoms can include headaches, sensitivity to light or sound, mood swings, vomiting, confusion, memory loss, loss of consciousness, and many others. CTE is more of a long term injury that can include memory loss, mood changes, increased aggression, depression, difficulty thinking, difficulty swallowing or eating.[2]

[1]https://www.cdc.gov/headsup/basics/concussion_whatis.html [2]https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/chronic-traumatic-encephalopathy/’

Why Does it Matter

Professional football is one the most watched sports in the world. The players in this violent game are at risk of having a significant decrease in length of life and quality of life. Some Players are seen to have killed themselves over the changes they are experiencing. In order to keep playing this massive game, players need to be made more aware of the dangers of their positions and overall effects that the game of football can have on them as they get older. The NFL has made significant changes to the game to make it safer for players and have decreased the amount of concussions, but the nature of the game is violent and concussions can never truly be taken out of the game.

Now lets look at the graphs

This first data looks at the concussions by teams all around the country. Here we can look at concussions by state and see what teams need to change. This data is a little outdated, but it is still vital information and recent enough towards finding the answer to the project. Also in order for this to work in Tableau I had to manually make a new excel files stating where the NFL teams are located.

According to the data points, this issue of concussions is pretty evenly distributed around the league. Although the Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals round out the top with 22 concussions over the course of 2012-2014. Miami Dolphins were at the Bottom with 5. The head states are Ohio, California, and Florida, with Ohio having the most per team with 22. This proves that concussions are a league wide issue and not just a one team anomaly.

Now we load the packages for the remaining graphs.

library(tidyverse)
library(tidytext)
library(ggthemes)
library(ggplot2)
library(readr)

The next data analyzes the concussions by position. 

Concussion_Injuries_2012_2014 <- read_csv("C:/Users/hamme/OneDrive/Desktop/R - Media/final/Concussion Injuries 2012-2014.csv")
Concussion_Injuries_2012_2014 %>% 
  count(Position, sort =TRUE) %>% 
  head(10)-> Position_count
Concussion_Injuries_2012_2014 %>% 
  count(Position, sort =TRUE)
## # A tibble: 14 x 2
##    Position             n
##    <chr>            <int>
##  1 Cornerback          64
##  2 Wide Receiver       56
##  3 Safety              51
##  4 Running Back        39
##  5 Tight End           39
##  6 Linebacker          37
##  7 Guard               26
##  8 Offensive Tackle    22
##  9 Defensive End       20
## 10 Quarterback         14
## 11 Defensive Tackle    13
## 12 Center               7
## 13 Full Back            3
## 14 Long Snapper         1
Position_count %>% 
  ggplot(aes(reorder(Position, n), n, fill = Position)) + geom_col() +ggtitle("NFL Concussions by Position")+
  coord_flip() +  ylab("Concussions") + xlab("Positions")+ theme_solarized()

By surprise cornerbacks are the most likely to get a concussion. But it makes sense because cornerbacks are some the most explosive players on the field. They take the most amount of running blunt force hits. But if you add up the Guard, Offensive Tackle and Center which makes up the offensive line it goes to 55 putting it in third.

Now lets look at the data for concussions per weeks during the season 

Concussion_Injuries_2012_2014 <- read_csv("C:/Users/hamme/OneDrive/Desktop/R - Media/final/Concussion Injuries 2012-2014.csv")
Concussion_Injuries_2012_2014 %>% 
  count(`Week of Injury`, sort =TRUE) %>% 
  arrange(`Week of Injury`)->weeks_count
weeks_count %>%
  ggplot(aes(`Week of Injury`, n)) + geom_line(color = "Blue")+ geom_point(size = 2, shape = 21, colour = "black", fill = "navy")+
  ggtitle("NFL Concussions by Week") + ylab("Number of Concussions") + xlab("Week of Season")+ theme_solarized()+ scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(0, 20, by = 1))

As shown in the graph most of the concussions occur during week one of the regular season. There is also a peak at week 12. Weeks 17-19 are lower due to the in activeness of post season games and off weeks. It makes sense for the most concussions to occur at the start because of the many head to head collisions that the players do not experience much in camp and practice. This proves that the amount of concussions are concentrated to the beginning. These were also data points before the NFL decided to add another game to the regular season in 2021.

Lastly lets look at the concussions over time 

NFL_Data <- read_csv("C:/Users/hamme/OneDrive/Desktop/R - Media/final/NFL Data.csv")
NFL_Data %>%
 ggplot(aes(x=Year))+ geom_line(aes(y= Total, color="Total"), size=1.8)+ 
 geom_line(aes(y=Game, color="Game"), size=1.5)+ 
 geom_line(aes(y=Practice, color="Practice"), size=1.5)+ ggtitle("Concussions Over Time")+ theme_solarized()+
 ylab("Number of Concussions")+ xlab("Year")+scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(2015, 2021, by = 1))+
 scale_y_continuous(breaks= seq(0, 300, by= 50)) + labs(color="Legend")

As shown in the chart above, the rate of getting concussions in the NFL have gone down over the past years, but not by a significant amount. 2020 was a different year in the data as 2020 did not have preseason games, also 2021 was also different as they added another game to the regular season, making the data a little skewed.But even with more games the number still appears to go down which is a good sign for the NFLs new rules. Most of these concussions occurred during games and not in practice.

Conclusion

As shown in all the data points of this report it is clear to see that there is still a lot of work to be done about changing the game in order to make it safer. The goal of this report was not to say that football is bad and needs to be taken away but it is to show and give information of where and why concussions are occurring. The debate lies in the questioning of if the NFL is doing enough to protect the players. Based off the data they have gotten better but not by a lot. They have made some new rule changes to make the game safer, but as shown in the data over the years the new rules don’t seem to be making a large impact. What I impose is to make the players more aware of which positions are more likely to get a concussion and when concussions are likely to strike to prepare the players for if or when one is to occur, so that if they get a concussion they can limit their injury time and lessen the chances of getting CTE in the future as it is a serious issue and needs to be made of notice.