'Kerr Collar' Could Protect Football Players From Serious Head And Neck Injuries

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- The battle to tackle football head injuries is moving in a new direction.

Concussion prevention has been centered around protecting the head, but we may have been looking in the wrong place.

The helmet is football's most iconic piece of equipment. It's also the last line of defense against head injuries, but as CBS2's Steve Overmyer explained, there may be a new way.

A Manhattan chiropractor has created the 'Kerr Collar.'

"We want to have the helmet touch the Kerr Collar and disperse the forces to the Kerr Collar and not let the helmet and neck take everything," Dr. Patrick Kerr explained. "We want to look at the head and neck together during a collision, and not just the head."

No one device can eliminate injury risk completely, but Kerr said this simple piece of equipment can reduce the force on the neck by 58 percent.

"Fifty-eight percent is better than zero, anything that's gonna help improve the safety of a child is something I'm very interested in," Floral Park High School, Football Coach, Mike Spina said.

Spina is part of a group that runs a safety camp on Long Island. He'll be asking the Floral Park school board to approve the use of the collar.

According to a study by Purdue University and the University of Michigan, the average high school player takes 650 hits per year. That combined head trauma is equivalent to a 30 mph car wreck.

It's been 6 years since Rutgers player Eric LeGrand fractured two vertebrae. He was left paralyzed from the neck down. LeGrand has since been able to regain use of his shoulders, but his life was forever changed.

"I'm sitting here and I need my mom, the nurses, and friends to feed me and do everything now," he said.

Last season saw the highest rate of catastrophic injury in high school football, with 10 players paralyzed. Because of injuries to the neck two players lost their lives.

"If we're going to play this game we'd better start understanding it better than we do now. Putting a kid out there without neck protection, you're just asking for injury," Kerr said.

Over the past two years alone more than $14 million has been spent on head trauma research.

The Kerr Collar costs $149.