Football has spent years changing its rules, upgrading protective equipment and tightening concussion protocols. The tackle itself, however, has proved harder to change. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tackling accounts for approximately 63% of concussions in high school football, keeping the mechanics of contact at the centre of the sport’s safety debate.
The exposure begins early. A CDC study of players aged six to 14 found that children playing tackle football sustained 15 times more head impacts than those playing flag football during practices and games, including 23 times more high-magnitude impacts. The agency recommends age-appropriate tackling techniques that avoid using the head to strike another player.
The stakes reach beyond individual games. More than 448,000 football-related injuries are reported among US children under 15 each year, according to figures cited by Bobby Hosea, founder of Tackle Camp Will Travel. The associated medical, legal, and liability costs are also substantial, reinforcing the financial consequences attached to how young players are trained.
Yet one of the most consequential chapters in football’s tackling debate dates back nearly two decades. In 2007, Hosea directly contacted NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and the NFL, offering the safer tackling system he had developed. The NFL declined the proposal. Three years later, during congressional hearings examining football-related brain injuries, Hosea’s name and tackling method were introduced by others as a potential solution. He was subsequently brought into USA Football as a tackling expert and member of its Health & Wellness Committee.
That sequence raises a question that remains difficult to ignore. If the NFL had been directly presented with Hosea’s tackling system in 2007, why was it not adopted when the issue of football-related brain injuries came under national scrutiny in 2010?
Hosea had already spent decades developing the mechanics behind his system. His approach, known as The Hosea Method, centres on a 12-step “Words to Play By” tackle progression. Athletes learn to lower through the knees, drive upward through the hips, and bring the arms upward during contact, keeping the head up and away from the collision before the shoulders make contact.
The system also changes how tackling is practiced. Rather than repeatedly creating bodily collisions between players during training, Hosea uses full-speed, game-simulated tackle drills without bodily contact with another person. The mechanics can therefore be rehearsed at game intensity while removing the collision itself from the training environment.
“Terminology dictates what you do with your body,” Hosea explains. “If you say, ‘wrap them up,’ that’s the first thing you’re going to hear from fans in the stands to coaches and players on the sideline. When someone misses a tackle, they’re going to all scream it. But it’s a generic term, and it creates a physical mechanism.”
His system grew from personal experience. At 14, Hosea suffered a concussion while playing backyard football after attempting a tackle using the technique he had seen on television. He recalls being knocked unconscious, followed by vomiting, headaches, and dizziness that persisted for roughly two weeks. The experience changed how he approached contact.
“I said, ‘I am not going to tackle like this,’” Hosea recalls. “I don’t know what motivated me to just step down really low and not bend at the waist and expose my head, but dipping, bending in my knees, almost like coming out of the blocks, but not leaning forward. I stepped downhill and reached back with my hands and threw double uppercuts, and that caused my hips to come up.”
That movement became what Hosea calls the “Dip-N-Rip,” eventually forming the foundation of the system he developed while coaching his son’s Pop Warner team. The emphasis on youth football was deliberate: the mechanics taught during those formative years can become automatic as players advance.
The method subsequently underwent scientific testing. An LA84-funded program in 2010 brought Hosea in to train coaches and players, with Hosea reporting that 200 coaches were certified. He also reports that participating leagues recorded a 97% reduction in concussions during the program, a result that is distinct from a general reduction in reported injuries.
The concept has attracted attention within the professional game. Former NFL safety Dashon Goldson credited Hosea with teaching him to tackle as a youth player and later worked with him again as a professional. Contemporary reporting described Hosea as an injury-preventive tackling specialist, while The New York Times examined his approach to teaching young players safer tackling mechanics.
A scientific evaluation commissioned through LA84 in 2011 examined the tackling mechanics further, with findings cited by Hosea showing a 43% reduction in helmet-first impact when his technique was used and the elimination of crown-first contact in the tested form and angle tackles. The findings provided scientific testing of the mechanics Hosea had developed years earlier.
The distinction between helmet involvement and concussion remains important. A head impact does not automatically constitute a diagnosed concussion, while repeated head impacts and concussions are treated as related but separate concerns in the scientific literature. The CDC notes that repeated head impacts can occur without immediate concussion symptoms while still raising concerns about brain health.
Hosea’s history with football’s governing institutions therefore matters as much as the mechanics themselves. He had taken the system directly to the NFL in 2007. When congressional scrutiny intensified three years later, his method was introduced during those hearings as a potential solution. USA Football subsequently brought him into its tackling work, including its Health & Wellness Committee.
The question is what happened next. “It’s time to stop talking, and it’s time to start doing something about it, because it’s the same thing over and over every year, and nothing gets changed,” Hosea remarks.
His criticism extends beyond individual coaches and players. The responsibility, he argues, belongs with the institutions that establish how the game is taught and played.
“It should not fall on the individual players and coaches to take responsibility for this; it has to fall on the football industry leaders to take the information we know to be true and take the steps needed to protect our players,” he says. “Teaching alternative tactics. No helmet will prevent injuries. We know this. It’s proven. It’s scientific. We need to change what we do with this knowledge. Kids are dying, but what are we doing about it? What is the NFL doing about it?”
Football has demonstrated that its rules and practices can change when the pressure to change becomes impossible to ignore. For Hosea, the issue is no longer whether football knows that tackling matters. If tackling remains responsible for such a large share of football concussions, changing the tackle itself is a safety question the sport can no longer leave at the edge of the conversation.
