Full-Contact Practice and Injuries in College Football

BACKGROUND Despite recent restrictions being placed on practice in college football, there are little data to correlate such changes with injuries. HYPOTHESIS Football injuries will correlate with a team's exposure to full-contact practice, total practice, and total games. STUDY DESIGN Descriptive epidemiological study. METHODS All injuries and athlete injury exposures (AE × Min = athletes exposed × activity duration in minutes) were recorded for an intercollegiate football team over 4 consecutive fall seasons. Weekly injuries and injury rates (injuries per athletic injury exposure) were correlated with the weekly exposures to full-contact practices, total practices, formal scrimmages, and games. RESULTS The preseason practice injury rate was over twice the in-season practice injury rate ( P < 0.001). For preseason, injury exposures were higher for full-contact practice ( P = 0.0166), total practices ( P = 0.015), and scrimmages/games ( P = 0.034) compared with in-season. Preseason and in-season practice injuries correlated with exposure to full-contact practice combined with scrimmages for preseason ( P < 0.008) and full-contact practice combined with games for in-season ( P = 0.0325). The game injury rate was over 6 times greater than the practice injury rate ( P < 0.0001). Concussions constituted 14.5% of all injuries, and the incidence of concussions correlated with the incidence of all injuries ( P = 0.0001). Strength training did not correlate with injuries. CONCLUSION Decreased exposure to full-contact practice may decrease the incidence of practice injuries and practice concussions. However, the game injury rate was over 6 times greater than the practice injury rate and had an inverse correlation with full-contact practice.