that's the stupidest part: you go all that length to make sure they don't get hurt on the field, but as a consequence of this they go gaga when they're older.
What about leaving the protections aside so they don't even crash into each other so violently?
This would do more for the brain than those helmets.
Hmm, kinda hard to play tackle football without violent contact, nature of the beast, at least now they know that brain damage is a possibility if you want to make a living at it..
Look up the history of American Football, starting with the inception of the game. It began in the mid-late 1800s (1880ish iirc) as a bastard child of Rugby, and for the first few decades of the game (through the early 1900s?), the uniforms were basically just like Rugby.
A ton of people died, relative to the number of those who played it. At the height of it all, it was basically common to see at least one death every week of the season.
The pads and rules were developed to PREVENT it all, while also making it a different game.
It's the very heart of the game, the very rules, the ones that make the game NOT rugby, that makes it that much more dangerous than rugby - at least when it comes to long-term neural health.
The guys who play Rugby are beasts, no joke, and the hits can be brutal and dangerous - but all the differences in the rules and play style (forward pass, what kind of hits are legal and not, etc) entirely breeds the type of contact seen in American Football.
You're not going to do away with the brutal hits by removing padding. That will only return the game to the most dangerous days of the sport.
They don't have to look like roid-raging guys for the hits to be hard and constant enough, padding or not, to produce the long-term damage we see.
What makes American Football what it is (regardless of amount of padding), is what makes it so potentially damaging to long-term neurological health.