Antonio Brown’s tenure with the Oakland Raiders couldn’t have gotten off to a rockier start.
What started as Brown missing time with frostbite has morphed into Brown threatening retirement over a helmet.
By now, you’ve probably heard that Brown has been forbidden from using his preferred helmet model, the Schutt Air Advantage. His legal team has explored ways to get the league and the NFLPA to budge on this collectively bargained helmet standard.
But so far, the league simply stated that a “player can’t practice or play in games with equipment that’s not approved.”
The Schutt Air Advantage would fall into that category, and the company itself would probably agree that Brown has better options available. Back in 2014, Schutt explained why it discontinued the Air Advantage. Basically, the technology had been surpassed by other helmets. Via ksat.com:
We discontinued making the helmet three years ago because current helmet technology had moved past it. The AiR Advantage was the last varsity helmet made by Schutt that featured traditional foam padding. That material, which is used by most other helmet manufacturers, does not perform as well as the TPU Cushioning we now use in all of our varsity helmets.
TPU (thermoplastic urethane) Cushioning absorbs significantly more impact across a wider variety of temperatures than any other helmet on the field. Third party testing by an independent, certified helmet testing facility has proven that, three years in a row. The AiR Advantage had lived out its useful life as a product and was discontinued when something better was developed.
That last sentence should be all Brown needs to see — something better has been developed.
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