NAPA, Calif. — But I’ll say it anyway: The Raiders should put Brown on notice today by sending him the dreaded “five-day letter,” which every agent and knowledgeable player would absolutely dread. This letter would mean that Brown would have to return to the team by Friday and (be an adult and) play with a league-approved helmet, or he would be put on the reserve/left squad list, meaning he couldn’t play for the Raiders or any team in 2019. It’s also Belichick insurance, preventing the Patriots or some other contender figuring they can deal with the Brown headache for four or five months if it allows them to win a game or three more.
I did consider urging the Raiders to just fire Brown. It just might come to that. But the five-day letter is a good starting point, because it draws a line in the sand immediately. As Mike Florio reported at Pro Football Talk, not reporting after receiving that letter would end Brown’s season and prevent the Raiders from having to pay $29.1 million future guarantees on Brown’s Oakland contract. It’s worth doing. Brown has driven the franchise to this, and he deserves this.
Today is not the day to make any judgment about Brown’s mental stability or his frame of mind. He might be fine; he might be legitimately troubled in a way we don’t know. I just know the Raiders went out on a limb to acquire him from Pittsburgh, then paid him a rich contract. Since then, Brown has been beyond childish about an issue that more than 2,000 players have coped with: wearing only safety-approved helmets in accord with a $60-million initiative in 2016 to ensure that every player wear a helmet that has been approved by a joint NFL/NFLPA testing process. Every team has 63 active and practice-squad players. So 2,015 players (some of whom might be ticked off about it) will start the season wearing approved helmets. One wants to wear a non-approved—and relatively unsafe—helmet. That one is Brown.
I want to add this part about the helmets in question.
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While in Seattle last week on my camp trip, my NBC team went to new helmet manufacture Vicis, which makes the top-tested helmet on the NFL market, the Vicis Zero1. Patrick Mahomes wears it. Julian Edelman wears it. About 200 players in the league wear a Vicis helmet. Vicis has some of the same equipment used by the NFL/NFLPA testers, including the kind of battering ram used to tests how much force is felt by the brain when the helmet is hit full-force. We were able to procure a 2006 Schutt Air Advantage helmet, close to Brown’s model if not exactly the same (his was at least 10 years old), and, with the help of the Vicis scientists, we measured three major areas.
Weight: The Schutt helmet weighed 3.70 pounds. The Vicis Zero1 was heavier—4.53 pounds. The fact that the helmet with more modern technology is .83 pounds heavier is a factor, to be sure. Players like to feel lighter.
Absorption of force. When impact-tested by the battering tool, the Schutt helmet recorded 73 g’s of force that would have impacted the brain. At the same force, the Vicis helmet, with its slightly malleable outer shell, recorded 53 g’s that would have impacted the brain. So, the brain of a player wearing this Schutt helmet would feel 37.7 percent more force of impact than the force on a brain protected by the new Vicis model.
Peripheral vision. Using a light to shine through the mask of the helmet and reflect onto a tool measuring the field of view, the Schutt helmet had a horizontal field of view of 210 degrees wide. The Vicis helmet had a 236-degree-wide field of view. The 26-degree improvement was a vision increase of 12 percent. The vertical vision was 40 degrees north to south in the Schutt model, 47 degrees north to south in the Vicis helmet—better by 18 percent in the newer helmet.
Peter King Says Raiders Should Send Antonio Brown a '5-Day Letter'
