NCAA: Administrating Sports Science Since 2014

The NCAA recently announced that it will be leading a major longitudinal study on concussions, partnering in the work with the U.S. Defense Department and the National Institute of Health. The study will cost at least $30 million and it plans to include 40,000 athletes during the initial 3-year run. (More from the NCAA announcement, and then even more.)

The research and any scientific results that get published will be important in their own right, but NCAA’s move in the direction of science seems important. It might even be monumental, if it becomes the mission for an organization that desperately needs one.

I first heard the idea for using intercollegiate sports as a kind of living laboratory at Purdue, where research into sports concussions is inter-disciplinary and cutting-edge. I spent a day visiting Eric Nauman, Tom Talavage and Larry Leverenz who run the concussion research program. Nauman and Talavage are the engineers whose work involves biomedical, mechanical, chemical and electrical engineering, and Leverenz is a athletic trainer and administrator. What I wrote at the time:

In Leverenz’s vision the group’s work takes football and makes it a kind of living laboratory. The nature of the game creates a steady stream of collisions for the investigators, and it sets up a test environment that is dynamic and unpredictable, yet still controlled by the rules of play. Each football player becomes a closed feedback loop. Outfitted with on-field sensors and detectors, then subject to off-field post-game fMRI tests, the data inform scientists’ understanding of the brain, but it also goes back into making better sensors, detectors and fMRI tests.

The improved padding materials that Nauman works on provide yet another dimension for the group to continuously improve on. And looking beyond new materials there will be new equipment designs and possibly new rules for a safer game, but the work also stands to have impacts beyond the gridiron.

Other sports with high concussion rates like hockey, soccer and action sports could also see advances in the safety of their equipment based on what football can discover. The auto industry might learn a thing or two. Football could be a testbed for next-generation combat helmets, for new central nervous system therapeutics.

As a group though, the Purdue researchers worry that their vision is out of step with the big sources of potential funding – the Defense Department, the National Institutes of Health and the NFL. Their impression based on their interactions with those agencies is that “they’d like to have a cure. They’d really like to have a drug that fixes everything,” says Nauman.

Back then, the concussion research at Purdue was mostly backed by General Electric and I don’t know if that has changed. It now appears that the world has changed and inter-disciplinary sports concussion research is in step with funders, even though Purdue is not listed among the first set of grantees in the report (UCLA, Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Wisconsin).

Funding living laboratories as competitive sports teams is not currently part of the NCAA mission, which is to govern intercollegiate competition and integrate it into higher education, per the purpose statement on NCAA.org. It does however seem like a way to improve the health and well-being of student athletes, and experimental subjects in scientific research, to pay student-athletes, all of them, for their time and devotion to training.

An earlier NCAA move to allow schools to give athletes unlimited free meals is a window into how the NCAA could evolve into a sports science-driven organization. By requiring basic reporting on athletes’ diets you have also collected valuable health data, data that can be checked against athlete performance data and against nutrition data for other populations and demographics (like here). Universities that are investing heavily in sports science for athlete performance are probably already doing exactly this, and already look at sports teams as living laboratories.

The sports-as-lab vision calls for NCAA to transition from what is mostly administrative incompetence in what is mostly media management to administrative competence in what would be a much larger job–science administration. There is not much about the NCAA to give anyone confidence that it can pull off transformation, but it might just happen if the NCAA works at it step-by-step, doing things like this concussions project.

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