Trailblazer leads the charge to make the NFL safer

Taylor Langon graduates on Dec. 17 with a Doctor of Athletic Training degree, and that accomplishment will only elevate her growing profile as the first-ever director of health and innovation for the National Football League. The position has her advancing research and policy around traumatic brain and musculoskeletal injuries.

A lifelong sports buff who also loves science, the 30-year-old at one time contemplated going to medical school before recognizing that athletic training bridges her interests.

“I was a sports fanatic. I loved sports, playing sports, watching sports,” says Langon, who as an undergraduate joined the Division I women’s rowing team at her small Catholic college in Connecticut.

She followed up elsewhere with a master’s degree and later a doctorate in kinesiology that honed her expertise in concussions just as research on the head injuries was evolving. That background quickly landed her a full-time role with Virginia Tech athletics.

“I was your non-traditional athletic trainer,” she says. “Instead of being assigned a sports team, I was the one that oversaw all of the concussion research, management and care for the athletes.”

A later position with the University of Georgia – during which time the Bulldogs won the 2022 NCAA football championship – had her working in the university’s concussion lab, a partner of the NFL-NCAA Research Consortium dedicated to aggregating data as part of efforts to make America’s game safer at all levels. Today, she oversees the entire consortium and serves as liaison for the athletic trainers, strength coaches, dietitians and equipment managers for the 32 professional teams.

High-tech tools

The NFL’s data-driven approach to reducing injuries relies on technology. Tracking the movements, speed and trajectories of players at time of impact offers a starting point for taking actions in the interest of their wellbeing.

Among the latest tech supporting such efforts: Sensors in mouthguards and helmets that collect information on the direction, force and severity of on-field hits. These can also report the position of a player’s head at time of impact, and tags attached to shoulder pads likewise capture a player's body orientation at the moment before going down. The use of “computer vision” (CV) allows researchers to analyze athletes’ specific maneuvers, as captured on film during games as well as practices, to better understand the types of improper movements that lead to injuries.

The resulting data – coming from across the league over the course of the preseason and 17 regular-season games as well as championship matches – finds it way to Langon’s office at the NFL’s Manhattan headquarters. She consults with biomechanical engineers and epidemiologists to identify key areas for intervention and formulate recommendations to share with the NFL commissioner.

Among the changes that have come out of work Langon has been involved with, some of it even prior to her current job: modification of kickoff rules to reduce high-velocity collisions and minimize the risk of head injuries. That has led to a verifiable decrease in kickoff-related injuries, particularly concussions, as players no longer run at full speed toward one another from opposite ends of the field. 

Another development in which Langon had a part: a “ramp-up” policy that the league rolled out in 2022 to “essentially increase the intensity of practice and the length of practice at a slow rate,” she explains. “So rather than having your first day of preseason being the heaviest, hardest day, it is a much more gradual increase up to that level of intensity.” Allowing players’ bodies to “adapt” to the demands of the game after time off has paid off in a reduction of strains, as published numbers show.

Langon also keeps close watch on the next iteration of helmets. For example, Guardian Caps, named for the company that makes them, are soft-shelled pads worn over football helmets – they are optional – and designed with the goal of reducing the risk of concussions and other head injuries. Very promising, Langon adds, are the new, position-specific helmets coming on the market. These don’t require the addition of the protective cover but have performed well on both the field and in the lab, she says.

Safety education

Langon doesn’t travel to competitions on a regular basis as she has no game-day duties, but she definitely gets around. During the annual four-day NFL Scouting Combine in February in Indianapolis, she was on site to oversee the physical tests and evaluations of the more than 300 athletes who participated. In addition to attending Super Bowl LIX, she flew to London in October for three international matches between U.S. teams – part of the NFL’s bid to make American football accessible to the wider world – to lead conferences there that presented football safety studies with ramifications for other sports, such as soccer and rugby. And she holds similar educational symposia around the United States.

“To be able to disseminate those findings and to help other leagues and other organizations of different levels also achieve the same goals of creating safer outcomes for players, I think, is really special and unique,” she says. “There’s a much broader impact that we are having, and I'm grateful to be at the NFL because we really are up on this pedestal, where we have the opportunity to make progress.”

In season and out, the work of improving conditions for gridiron warriors never ends. Task forces, for example, contribute to a growing body of best practices. In the case of the task force on shoulder injuries, Langon works “very closely” with another alumna, Julie Frymyer MS ’07, an athletic trainer with the Kansas City Chiefs whom quarterback Patrick Mahomes tweeted out for her handling of the superstar’s sprained ankle ahead of the 2023 AFC Championship Game.

Entrepreneurial mindset

Just as the NFL pushes for continuous improvement, so too has Langon focused on scaling up her own skills.

Understanding the collaborative nature of the work she was already doing with the NCAA – where myriad health profesionals as well as companies and other orgs have a role to play in supporting player health – she had her sights on the Doctor of Athletic Training from FIU well before joining the NFL in September of 2023.

The program is one of just a handful in the country and, Langon says, “It completely changes the way that you think and view the world, whether it's within business or within sports medicine or combining those two. I knew that it was going to help me grow and diversify my background.”

Professor Jeff G. Konin directs the program, which typically takes two years to complete. He served as Langon’s advisor and describes her as emblematic of the high caliber of student it attracts, all of whom enter with multiple degrees as well as experience in the field.

“The program is for the person who has that passion to go to the next level of leadership, specifically as it pertains to sports medicine settings,” Konin says. “All of them are expert clinicians. They’re already professional athletic trainers. We teach them how to think at a higher level. We try to create an entrepreneurial mindset, so that when something arises, they shift their energies to ‘how do we solve this.’”

Offered online, the program draws enrollees from around the world. 

“People come here because of what we teach them, but everyone feeds off of each other and becomes better because of that,” Konin says. “When you have people who work in professional sports or high-level college sports, or own their own businesses, you get a lot of different perspectives during live discussions.”

A required annual three-day group visit to campus builds connections among the students. Graduates now work for every major U.S. athletic league in addition to many overseas leagues, lead their own consulting firms or serve in any of a variety of other positions within the world of sports.

Says Langon, on the cusp of walking across the FIU commencement stage, “What I've learned in this program will carry on with me throughout the course of my professional journey.”