The N.F.L.’s Incredible Shrinking Pads (Published 2018) (2024)

Before his first N.F.L. game, New Orleans Saints tight end Benjamin Watson sat in a locker room filled with the biggest, most fearsome football players he had ever seen and had one thought:

“I want to wear every pad I can get my hands on.”

Then Watson noticed that his teammates had shed all their arm, hip, thigh and knee pads. Shoulder pads had been trimmed and streamlined. Thick neck guards were left in lockers.

“Everyone was wearing as little protection as possible,” Watson said. “Guys were even cutting out the pockets in their uniforms where the pads are meant to go so they could be more form fitting.”

It was Watson’s first N.F.L. culture lesson. Excess padding was a sign of weakness; a skimpy layer of protection shouted an air of toughness.

“There’s an intimidation factor,” Watson said recently, recalling his first game in 2004. “You want to look confident and unafraid. Today, it’s even more that way than when I was a rookie.”

Throughout the modern N.F.L., where high-speed collisions are the norm and injuries rampant, there is a counterintuitive dress code. Some protective equipment, like a good helmet, is necessary for survival, but every year the players strive to wear less gear over all.

“I want the thinnest pads possible,” Washington wide receiver Jamison Crowder said last month. “I only wear what’s required, and I get the lightest available versions of that.”

Fifty years ago, Hall of Fame linebackers like Dick Butkus and Ray Nitschke literally looked like giants of the gridiron with gargantuan, yard-wide shoulder pads, bulky hand and forearm guards, rolled leather neck collars and thigh pads as thick as textbooks.

That is especially true of wide receivers and defensive backs, whose careers are built on being fleet and agile. Wide receivers’ shoulder pads are often more like a small harness wrapped in hard-sided plastic and weighing only a few pounds. Arms are always free of encumbrance. Quarterbacks often wear something called a flak jacket, which is a reinforced padding that hangs from the bottom of the shoulder pads to protect the rib cage, but wide receivers eschew anything so restrictive.

In fact, they consider extra padding a hazard.

“For a receiver, it’s about speed downfield and getting in and out of small gaps between the defenders as fast as you can,” Willie Snead, a Baltimore Ravens wide receiver, said. “If you’re weighed down by padding, you’re not necessarily safer at all. You’d be slower and probably get hit more.

“Right now, a good receiver doesn’t have to get hit that much. The only time you really get hit is when you’re getting tackled.”

As for defensive backs, they have to chase those receivers, so they swear off things they routinely wore in high school, like hip pads. (All high school and N.C.A.A. players are required to wear hip, thigh and knee pads, but in the N.F.L. rule book hip pads are merely “recommended.”)

“Nobody wears hip pads in the N.F.L.,” a laughing Eric Weddle, the veteran Ravens safety, said. “That would be crazy if I saw someone with hip pads in an N.F.L. game. Totally insane.”

It would be, Weddle suggested, career suicide.

“In the N.F.L., it’s about not wanting to be hindered,” he said. “We believe an extra pad might give a fast wide receiver six inches of separation from us in coverage and that might cost our team a touchdown. If that happens enough, it might cost you your job. Whether that’s really the case or not, in our minds, we believe it is.”

The less-is-more mantra is not only pervasive among wide receivers and defensive backs. The Philadelphia Eagles' Pro Bowl defensive end Michael Bennett wears shoulder pads designed for kickers that look tiny on his 6-foot-4, 280-pound frame.

Seated on a stool 30 minutes after an Eagles practice last month, Bennett reached into his locker and lifted his shoulder pads with only two fingers.

“Small pads make me a better pass rusher,” he said, displaying the pads flexibility. “I’ve got complete range of motion and I use my hands more instead of just throwing my shoulder into someone. I engage with an offensive lineman the right way — with outstretched arms.”

In 2013, the N.F.L. mandated the use of thigh and knee pads but most knee pads now are smaller than a slice of bread and wafer-thin. Thigh pads are only a little bigger. The only other required protection is a helmet and shoulder pads.

While less padding and a streamlined style has become the overwhelming N.F.L. norm — vanity also plays a part because players believe it makes them look better on TV — today’s players are not the first to consider less protection a strategic advantage.

In the 1990s, the shoulder pads worn by one of the game’s best offensive tackles, Jacksonville’s Tony Boselli, were so small that a teammate called them nothing more than “sponges and duct tape.”

McCaffrey, who is a gangly 6-foot-5 and 210 pounds, said he never felt as if he was putting himself in peril. When he sustained a compound fracture of his lower leg on a jarring hit in a 2001 game, he noted that the contact was against his shin, where no one player wears padding.

And McCaffrey passed on his tips for modifying a uniform to his son Christian, now a running back with the Carolina Panthers. One family trick: double-sided carpet tape will keep a jersey stuck tight to shoulder pads.

“When I was seven years old and starting youth football, my dad taped my pads to my jersey so no one could grab my jersey to tackle me,” Christian said. “He taught me a bunch of little things like that and I still use them. It’s all about removing bulk.”

But not every N.F.L. player is ditching protective gear in hopes of getting faster. Like Benjamin Watson, Eli Manning came into the N.F.L. in 2004. But he didn’t conform to the prevailing equipment trend then, and he still doesn’t.

“No, no, no, I want to be protected,” Manning said. “And I go for the newer, safer products when they come out. Other than making sure I can do my normal throwing motion, give me the protection.”

Manning paused.

“Yeah,” he continued, “protected.”