Concussions in American Football
NCAA Sports Injury fact sheet, (article downloaded from Datalys Center, www.datalyscenter.org)
More statistics, more numbers. This is a way to think about the risk to your footballer based on past events and the overall history of the sport. Here we are considering the likelihood of injury in college football.
First think about athletic exposure as the chance of an injury happening based on the play of the game. So every practice, every snap of the ball whether in scrimmage or in the game is a chance to be hurt or an exposure. In football there is 8.1 injuries per 1,000 athletic exposures. Over six years of the sport there were 25 million athletic exposures. This is based on 633 NCAA institutions and 64,879 student-athletes with an average team size of 103.
Most injuries involve the lower body or 50.4% of all injuries with 7.4% of total injuries being concussions. Based on these numbers, we would expect approximately 505 reported concussions to occur per year across all 633 NCAA schools collectively per year. So 1-2 concussions per team per year. Said another way 1 in 50 players who take the field, (game or practice) will be concussed.
The numbers are the numbers.