Roman aims to be soldier of change
Ex-NFL lineman working to ensure protection against head-to-head hits
John Roman has glimpsed it in the eyes of former teammates. At reunions and get-togethers down the years, he’s seen them struggle, seen the hefty price paid for football success, seen those no longer there physically or present mentally.
For some reason, Roman finds himself an anomaly, a lineman whose body and mind endured seven seasons in the NFL and emerged relatively (and gratefully) unscathed. The fortune that spared Roman consequences that have befallen many peers has endowed him with a sense of responsibility.
“I wanted to be an agent of change,” Roman said last week, “to contribute in some way and make the game safer.”
As his 65th birthday approaches, Roman’s past cleaves neatly in half. For the first 32 years, since the age of eight, Roman was mostly defined as a football player. A standout at Idaho State, then nearly 100 games in the trenches with the New York Jets.
As his NFL career faded in 1983, Roman gravitated toward Wall Street in an era where NFL players needed more than stardom to pay the bills. In the last 32 years, the son of a bus driver from Absecon, N.J., has made finance his life.
Endowed with a new mission, Roman fused the two hemispheres of his expertise. The result is Defend Your Head, a Chester Springs company that has grown on the back of ProTech, a helmet covering that reduces the forces wrought by the game and the head injuries they inflict. It’s the kind of technology
that leaves those devoted to football evangelizing about unknown marvels that will rescue the game from its morass of declining participation, distressing headlines and devastating health nightmares.
“When you’ve been so emotionally wrapped up and devoted to a sport like I was for years,” Roman, the company president, said, “and wake up at an older age and in a positon where you have some capital you’re able to commit to a worthy project, there’s nothing more worthy than in some small way to make a contribution to making the game safer for players coming behind me.”
Roman and Executive Chairman/CEO Glenn Tilley, an All-Ivy linebacker at Princeton, meld business acumen with compassion borne of years on the gridiron. Their goal echoes many coaches who bear the scars of football’s brutal past: To use their resources to make football safer and more sustainable.
“As helmets collide, we want that force to be a small as possible,” Roman said. “By slowing force when two helmets collide, we want to reduce the amount of force the brain absorbs.”
“I think that’s going to be the wave of the future, to make sure kids are protected, to make sure they don’t lose out on football,” Archbishop Carroll coach and former NFL linebacker Dan Connor said of the promise of technological salvations. “You’d hate to see that get taken away. Coaches need to embrace the technology. … It is going to be good for football.”
ProTech is in its second season of widespread deployment after years of testing, though the marketing rollout has yet to be mobilized nationwide, relying mostly on word of mouth. The goal is to snap on the product at 100-125 programs this fall, from youth to high school to college. Roman Catholic in Philadelphia is an early adopter, and several Catholic League schools, among them Connor’s Patriots, have placed orders.
The College of the Holy Cross and Western Carolina are at the vanguard of college implementation, with Defend Your Head filling orders by several power-conference programs.
The technology mimics many coaches who acknowledge the massive forces in play and endeavor to minimize them. Defend Your Head’s product testing reports a 14 percent reduction in “head injury criteria,” a matrix of factors determining likelihood of concussion from a hit, and an 18 percent decrease in acceleration.
ProTech fits over a standard helmet, the polyurethane foam dissipating the force of a collision slowly to reduce acceleration incurred by the brain. The smooth cover has a lower coefficient of friction to glance off hits, is antimicrobial, waterproof and resistant to extremes in temperature. The slip-on installation offers scalability for other helmeted contact sports like lacrosse and hockey, a frontier of ongoing exploration.
The product also finds a volcanic landscape.
The NFL in 2014 dissolved an agreement with Riddell as its exclusive helmet supplier, inked in the late 1980s and intended in perpetuity. Riddell and Schutt retain large shares of the market, but the field has opened. ProTech, though primarily used in practices where experts agree most concussions occur, is sanctioned for game play by the National Federation of State High School Athletic Associations (NFHS).
Roman seems particularly proud of the product’s prevalence in the youth ranks, which encompasses the largest and most vulnerable segment of participation.
“It’s not just that the market and the numbers are there, but it’s where we think we should be,” Roman said. “We think our product should be worn at the youth levels as young men are growing; brains are forming, and we want to do everything we can to reduce helmet collision forces, which has been the goal from the beginning.”
Tilley also has a rags-tofootball-riches story, raised in Northeast Philadelphia and starring at William Penn Charter, a launch pad to Princeton. He draws a straight line from success on the gridiron to business prosperity. That’s why his company features a 179word disclaimer on its website that reads, in essence, that ProTech isn’t an invincibility cloak that makes its wearer impervious to head injury.
Many coaches shepherding the game through this tumultuous era are coming to grips with that reality, that the silver bullet to cure decades of ills doesn’t exist. Technological advances only go so far, no substitute for the game reckoning with the violence that once defined it and the barbarity that could yet destroy it.
“We are a piece of the overall potential solution,” Tilley said. “I think it’s going to be ongoing that we have to keep getting better to do everything we can to minimize risk. We would be doing that in general for safety so that you can go out and play. I think ultimately it will be a combination of proper teaching and technique, which we have now, and practice methodology. …
“I think it’s a combination of three, and that’s our focus, to do our part.”