While concussions and head injuries abound in football practices, thanks to the newly created Mobile Virtual Player — a robotic dummy created by Dartmouth students that the College’s football team has used in practices since August — the number of injuries sustained by players has fallen while athletes are still able to train with a mobile target.
The danger of concussions in football at the college level prompted football head coach Buddy Teevens ’79 to reach out to the Thayer School of Engineering in 2013 to create a safe, mobile practice dummy for his players. Two then-seniors at Thayer — Elliot Kastner ’13 and Quinn Connell ’13 — worked on the MVP with other students as a capstone project during their senior year. The pair continued to work on it part-time for two years before returning to the project full-time this past summer.
The MVP is essentially a robotic football player that can be used in practices to avoid injuring players, Teevens said.
“Unless we change the way we teach the game as football coaches, we’re not going to have a game to teach,” he said.
He referenced Barack Obama’s interview with the New Yorker prior to the 2014 Super Bowl, where the president said that if he had a son, he would have to “think long and hard” before allowing his child to play football.
Teevens said he submitted the idea for the project as a way to eliminate player-to-player contact while still improving tackling skills with a moving target. After on-and-off work over the past two years, the MVP was finally ready for use in August, he said.
The MVP is a remote-controlled football player capable of moving throughout the field, mimicking routes taken by live players in gameplay and providing extensive tackling practice for the team, Teevens said. The only thing a football player can do that the MVP cannot is throw a football.
“There’s really nothing like the [MVP], just because it is so versatile for so many positions,” football player Folarin Orimolade ’17 said. “Defensive backs can use it because it can run a route and you can tackle it as it’s running a route.”
While the MVP was designed for use in football practices, it is capable of being used with other sports, Kastner said.
Players were often taken out of games or sidelined for large parts of the season due to concussions, Teevens said. He added that most of the concussions would occur during practice and were due to multiple hits, not a single collision, which led him to take the unusual step of banning tackling during practice five years ago.
The new policy was not immediately popular with coaches and players, but Teevens found that tackling dummies and pads — rather than teammates — led to a drop in both the team’s head injury rate and its rate of missed tackles. Since 2010, he said, the number of injuries on the team has dropped by as much as 80 percent.
“I really believe we’re doing the right thing,” he said. “I feel a lot better going into homes and saying, ‘this is how we treat your son,’ and I am encouraging other people to [eliminate tackling in practices].”
The football team remained competitive against other Division I teams, despite no longer using live tackling in practices, Teevens said.
With the players’ game getting stronger and their bodies staying safer, the rule has become very popular among team members, according to football players interviewed by The Dartmouth.
Yet while pads and immobile dummies cut injury rates, Teevens said they were not able to fully replicate a moving target. To compensate for the disadvantages of the immobile dummies and pads, Teevens contacted Thayer to offer funding for a versatile, mobile tackling dummy.
The MVP has major implications for making contact sports safer by eliminating the human element, which cuts the risk of injury to the players significantly, Teevens said. Players who wish to continue with their athletic careers professionally and those planning to go into another career are both benefited by minimizing collisions, he said.
“I feel like I’m doing everything I can to make our game and our players as safe as I possibly can and still play the game at a very high level,” Teevens said.
Kastner — who played on the football team under Teevens for five years — said that he never suffered a concussion but saw numerous teammates injured while he was on the team.
“Making contact at practice is good to play better, but if your players can’t make it to the game day then what’s the point of doing any of those drills?” Kastner said. “I really realized how important having an effective way to tackle at practice can benefit a team.”
Thanks to the MVP, the only time players are hit is in games — of which they have 10 each year, Teevens said.
The players can reach a deeper level within a specific skill set by practicing with the MVP without the risk of injury, he said.
“One of the unanticipated benefits [is] if you’re not hitting guys every day, the toll on their bodies is reduced, so your first-level guys are more capable of playing and they don’t miss as much practice,” he said.
The team behind the MVP is now sponsoring another senior engineering course at Thayer so an additional group of students can work on developing certain aspects of the tackling dummy, Kastner said. The current prototype is the third iteration and is constantly being updated and reworked to meet its full potential, Connell said.
The close relationship between the College’s athletics department and Thayer is unusual, Teevens said. He credited the “collegiality” between the engineering school and the football team for the production of the MVP.
“We can save people’s brains here,” he said.
Kastner and Connell raised funds from their family and friends to continue with the project and obtained laboratory space from Thayer over the summer to complete the MVP, they said. Once Kastner and Connell were working on the MVP full-time, the project moved quickly, and by August the football team was using the first prototype of the MVP in practices, Kastner said.
The team now brings the MVP in and out of practices as the engineers and players work together to see what still needs improvement, Kastner said.
The MVP still needs to be updated and have small complications removed for it to be more marketable, Kastner said. Currently, the mechanisms for charging the MVP — which are not as simple as Kastner and Connell would like — are being updated, he said.
The players have also noticed that this dummy is more bottom-heavy and is therefore prone to falling down more easily, football player Eric Wickham ’15 said.
The next step in the MVP’s development will be the construction of a small batch of dummies that can be tested by other teams, Kastner said. If the MVP continues to be successful, Kastner and Connell hope to manufacture them for sale, he said.
A finalized version of the MVP is set to be completed by Dec. 1, Teevens said.
“It’s hard to have a clear vision of where things are going to end up six months or years down the line, but I think we’re all really happy with where it’s at right now and we’ll continue development,” Connell said.
Four National Football League teams have expressed interest in the technology, Teevens said.
With huge budgets for improving their teams, NFL teams often are on the lookout for innovative technology, Kastner said, so the interest is an important step for the project.
Once the NFL deems a new technology useful, it usually trickles down to the college level and then to high school teams as well, Kastner said, so sending a small batch of MVPs to the NFL could be a crucial step in marketing the technology.
The MVP has already received coverage from numerous media outlets, including CNN, the Discovery Channel and National Public Radio.
“As soon as some video and pictures and stuff leaked and went viral and blew up, it was just a testament to how great the need is for a solution like this,” Connell said.
The MVP has made Dartmouth’s football practices safer, but it could still expand to other schools and professional teams, Kastner said.
“I think the dummy has kind of revolutionized the way tackling can be done in practice,” Orimolade said.
