The incredible shrinking pads in ‘macho’ NFL
With players’ need for speed, protection isn’t the priority.
Before his first NFL game, New Orleans Saints tight end Benjamin Watson sat in a locker room filled with the biggest, most fearsome football players he had ever seen and had one thought:
“I want to wear every pad I can get my hands on.”
Then Watson noticed his teammates had shed all their arm, hip, thigh and knee pads. Shoulder pads had been trimmed and streamlined. Thick neck guards were left in lockers.
“Everyone was wearing as little protection as possible,” Watson said. “Guys were even cutting out the pockets in their uniforms where the pads are meant to go so they could be more form fitting.”
It was Watson’s first NFL culture lesson. Excess padding was a sign of weakness; a skimpy layer of protection shouted an air of toughness.
“There’s an intimidation factor,” Watson said recently, recalling his first game in 2004. “You want to look confident and unafraid. Today, it’s even more that way than when I was a rookie.”
Throughout the modern NFL, where high-speed collisions are the norm and injuries are rampant, there is a counterintuitive dress code. Some protective equipment, like a good helmet, is necessary for survival, but every year the players strive to wear less gear overall.
“I want the thinnest pads possible,” Washington Redskins wide receiver Jamison Crowder said last month. “I only wear what’s required, and I get the lightest available versions of that.”
Fifty years ago, Hall of Fame linebackers like Dick Butkus and Ray Nitschke literally looked like giants of the gridiron with gargantuan, yard-wide shoulder pads, bulky hand and forearm guards, rolled leather neck collars and thigh pads as thick as textbooks.
But the game has changed in myriad ways. While a long-standing macho ethos remains, pass-happy offenses have replaced the pounding rushing games of the past, and that has put a new premium on speed and elusiveness. With the help of technologically advanced materials that make equipment lighter, many players now take to the field with little protection.
That is especially true of wide receivers and defensive backs, whose careers are built on being fleet and agile. Wide receivers’ shoulder pads are often more like a small harness wrapped in hard-sided plastic and weighing only a few pounds. Arms are always free of encumbrance. Quarterbacks often wear something called a flak jacket, which is a reinforced padding that hangs from the bottom of the shoulder pads to protect the rib cage, but wide receivers eschew anything so restrictive.
In fact, they consider extra padding a hazard.
“For a receiver, it’s about speed downfield and getting in and out of small gaps between the defenders as fast as you can,” Willie Snead, a Baltimore Ravens wide receiver, said. “If you’re weighed down by padding, you’re not necessarily safer at all. You’d be slower and probably get hit more.
“Right now, a good receiver doesn’t have to get hit that much. The only time you really get hit is when you’re getting tackled.”
As for defensive backs, they have to chase those receivers, so they swear off things they routinely wore in high school, like hip pads. (All high school and NCAA players are required to wear hip, thigh and knee pads, but in the NFL rule book, hip pads are merely “recommended.”)
“Nobody wears hip pads in the NFL,” a laughing Eric Weddle, the veteran Ravens safety, said. “That would be crazy if I saw someone with hip pads in an NFL game. Totally insane.”
In 2013, the NFL mandated the use of thigh and knee pads, but most knee pads now are smaller than a slice of bread and are wafer thin. Thigh pads are only a little bigger. The only other required protection is a helmet and shoulder pads.
While less padding and a streamlined style have become the overwhelming NFL norm — vanity also plays a part because players believe it makes them look better on TV — today’s players are not the first to consider less protection a strategic advantage.
In the 1990s, the shoulder pads worn by one of the game’s best offensive tackles, Jacksonville’s Tony Boselli, were so small a teammate called them “sponges and duct tape.”
But not every NFL player is ditching protective gear in hopes of getting faster. Like Watson, Eli Manning entered the NFL in 2004. But he didn’t conform to the prevailing equipment trend then, and he still doesn’t.
“No, no, no — I want to be protected,” Manning said. “And I go for the newer, safer products when they come out. Other than making sure I can do my normal throwing motion, give me the protection.”
Manning paused. “Yeah,” he continued, “protected.”