Holed up in a bedroom fighting the flu, Al.  Flu medication...can be strong, can be effective or ineffective while you are fighting the chills of a fever/hot flashes on the roller coaster of Germ Warfare. I dunno what the hell my kids brought me from daycare, but GD, this would render a battalion of Marines highly useless. In between my dreams of delirium mixed with ESPN Radio and Finebaum and ill timed trips to the bathroom,   somehow your dreams and the radio program meld together and you are actually floating around the Studio in a dreamlike state watching the words come out of their mouth. It was in one of these half dreams/reality that the subject of concussions came up, and NFL hits, and helmet to helmet blah blah blah....then the show goes to a commercial about cars and safety ratings, and thats when the medicine mixed with the radio program took a weird turn...

The next thing I know, I'm in a football game playing CB in a game in high school we should have won. Something was different, the helmets were a little heavier and there was a HUD in the upper left corner, like a lil flip down shield that I guess measure G-forces and footspeed. You could flip them up in the huddle, but  they had to be flipped down before the snap. I flip the HUD down, just in time to see the flanker get the handoff headed at full steam right at me. Being that I had to come up and make the hit, there was a "hit meter" that was measuring his speed and my closing speed and the % of a chance of a concussion if we stayed on the direct helmet to helmet (I'm guessing there are sensors that communicate with one another to give and take this information) and it gave me an audible instruction(like GPS) to hit him lower to avoid a concussion, which I did. After the hit, it gave the info on the "crash" or "hit" and the forces my head took. The next play I could not avoid hitting the ballcarrier head on since I was blocked in the back and we collided, then a loud "impact imminent" alarm went off in my helmet because I was gonna be out of position to take the hit, and once we hit, true, my bell got rung, but also a mini-facemask freakin AIRBAG deployed and I was forced to leave the game, even though I didnt think I had a concussion, it was for the sake of safety. And since they had a walkthru MRI on the sideline, I checked out ok. It was a pretty neat deal. You get the ball carriers speed and it gives you the proper angle of attack, very much like aircraft have in their HUDS. The only weird thing was as the game went on, the helmets changed color, almost to a deep red, meaning you had taken too many hits(especially LB's) and had to swap out your helmet since it was compromised. I think we are about 30 yrs from this technology, and the helmets were way too heavy....back to sleep...Mike Leach is on Finebaum....