The NFL says Guardian Caps make football safer. The science isn’t so sure

Yahoo Sports | American Football | 09/24/2026

Josephy Raines/Yahoo Sports illustration

By Jeff Eisenberg, Senior writer

After enduring four concussions in his first three NFL seasons, Chris Olave decided he could no longer justify prioritizing swag over safety.

The New Orleans Saints receiver has begun wearing a Guardian Cap over his helmet on game days in hopes that the cartoonishly bulky, foam-padded covering offers better protection against blows to the head.

“Shoot, I got kids now,” Olave told reporters earlier this month after his team’s season opener against Detroit. “I want to live a regular life after I’m done with football. I love my kids to death. So, I don’t really care how it looks no more. I just got to throw it on.”

For football players, the dangers of strapping on a helmet and stepping between the white lines have never been clearer. Scientists have demonstrated that the cumulative effect of repeated blows to the head is the most reliable predictor of what could cause someone to suffer from the degenerative brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

At least 1 in 4 former NFL players who died from 2016-2021 had CTE, according to a recent study published in the British Medical Journal, and researchers say that 25% estimate represents a conservative floor. The prevalence of CTE among deceased former NFL players has only further ratcheted up the pressure on the league to show that it’s proactively hunting for answers.

Since 2022, the NFL has touted the innovation of a mom-and-pop duo as a potential solution. NFL officials have cited lab tests showing that the Guardian Cap cushions the impact of hits to the head by at least 9%. They also point to a roughly 50% reduction in concussions when players wear the extra layer of padding over their helmets during practices.

Those figures are the NFL’s rationale for requiring players to either wear a Guardian Cap during contact practices or one of the handful of helmet models that have performed best during safety tests. The league has also permitted the use of Guardian Caps during games since the start of the 2024 season, though Olave is one of just a few dozen players who have risked social media ridicule by wearing one on a game day.

“We think it has been a step forward for player safety overall,” said Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president for health and safety initiatives.

And yet not all independent neurologists and neuroscientists support America’s most powerful and visible sports league throwing its weight behind the Guardian Cap. Some expressed concern that Guardian Caps give athletes a false sense of security without meaningfully reducing the risk of CTE. Others cited a 2025 study involving the NFL’s top medical official that poked holes in the league’s claim associating Guardian Caps with a decrease in concussions.

Providing further fuel for criticism is the fact that the Guardian Cap NXT model worn by NFL and Division I college players is not the same as the product marketed to the masses. The lighter-weight XT model, which sells for as much as $89.99, has less padding than the NXT. Impact tests conducted by multiple different laboratories have shown that the XT model may be less effective than the NXT at protecting the head and reducing injury risk.

“The jury is out on whether the Guardian Cap is helping NFL players,” said Chris Nowinski, co-founder of Boston University’s CTE Center and one of the world’s most renowned figures in brain injury research. “We have no reason to believe it’s helping high school and college players.

“We’ve created a sort of nightmare scenario where people strap these things on their kids’ helmets and believe they’re now safe from concussions and CTE. Nothing could be further from the truth.”