In high school, Ryan DePaul starred as a defensive end and tight end. But to earn playing time as a freshman at Kean University, he got relegated to special teams, blocking and tackling during kickoffs—one of the most brutal plays in all of sports. On kickoffs, teams often send out their most dispensable players to charge down the field, build up speed, and ram into each other like crash test dummies. A few years ago, the National Football League found that players were four times more likely to suffer a concussion on kickoffs compared to running or passing plays (and has since changed kickoff rules to reduce high-speed collisions).
At Kean, it didn’t take long for DePaul to suffer a concussion, and then more concussions, which eventually forced him to stop playing.
“I really banged myself up pretty good,” he says. “But I still had this itch to want to play football.”
In 2006, a few years after college, DePaul recruited some guys from high school for a football league that resembled a backyard game—seven-on-seven, no kickers or kickoffs, no helmets or pads. Unlike flag football leagues, however, tackling was still very much encouraged. He called the league Town Beef and gave it a slogan: Football for the forgottens.
“If you played basketball, you could go down to the courts and play a pickup game, but if you were a football player, there was really nothing you could do,” he says. “I put out ads on Craigslist and MySpace, and started to realize how many guys actually still wanted to play football.”
Town Beef took off. By the second year, 18 teams competed across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. By 2010, there were 55 teams in eight states, stretching all the way to Florida. Guys piled into vans to travel to games for a chance to extend their glory days. Some never had glory days to begin with, they just liked tackling people.
Then, in 2015, DePaul partnered with a childhood friend, Sener Korkusuz, to turn the league into a business. They crowdfunded $700,000, concentrated the football talent (including many former college players) on fewer teams, added a cash prize to be split among the champions, and rechristened the league the American 7s Football League. They’ve since partnered with local TV networks and smaller streaming services like DAZN and Fox Soul, and are on the hunt for a big media rights deal. This year, 15 teams are competing for $25,000. Think of it as semi semi-pro.
The thought of former players signing up for more hits—without equipment—can sound masochistic. It might seem like a step backward for the sport, towards football’s brutal early days, when helmetless prep school players died so frequently that President Theodore Roosevelt staged an intervention that led to rule changes and, eventually, helmets. Today, youth league participation is in decline, partly due to worries about safety, and some NFL players retire in their 20s over concerns about brain damage, even if it means forgoing millions of dollars. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell recently announced the league was “aggressively” trying to create a pro flag football league.
But the A7FL actually represents a different theory about how to make football safer: What if the best way to address head trauma in football isn’t to trade tackling for flags, or to tweak helmets, penalties, and injury protocols, as the NFL has done? What if it’s to remove helmets altogether? The A7FL’s logic is that without helmets, football players tackle more like rugby players, with proper form that spares their heads from concussions and lowers the risk of debilitating long-term health problems like chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which plagues many former NFL players. The A7FL advertises itself as a less risky alternative to helmeted football—and a more hardcore alternative to no-tackle flag football.
If you’re a fan, player or parent who wants a safer sport — and for the hits to keep coming — the A7FL offers an alluring alternative. But is it exciting enough to compete with traditional football?
The A7FL is still small, but players say it’s different in a way that’s thrilling. “It gives you a different perspective of the game and shows your ability,” says former Arizona Cardinal Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie. After 12 years as a pro cornerback, the two-time Pro Bowler became the first NFL veteran to join the A7FL. “When you’ve got 11 on 11, it’s easier to make up for someone’s mistake,” Rodgers-Cromartie says. Not so in the A7L. There’s nowhere to hide, and, without helmets and pads, no protection from contact. “They’re hitting for real,” he adds. “I was shocked. I was like, This is definitely my type of sport.”
“There’s something not right with us in the head,” Kenny Stansbury says, looking across the field. Stansbury has been with the A7FL since 2015, and he still marvels that grown men keep signing up to hit each other. Around him, players are stretching, jogging, and lacing up cleats. Guys in football jerseys vape by a bench. A few kneel down to pray. One guy picks up a white football and throws it to someone sprinting down the sideline.
It’s March in Asbury Park, New Jersey. We’re a hail mary away from the Jersey Shore, but it’s too cold and windy for anyone to think about the beach. Players file into Asbury Park Stadium for the 2025 season kick-off—or, rather, throw-off. A7FL games begin with three defenders trying to stop one returner, who receives a ball thrown by the defense. DePaul invented the rule when he started Town Beef, along with a few other modifications. A7FL teams play on a narrower field than the NFL, 37 yards wide instead of 53.3 yards. And the quarterback starts with the ball instead of taking a snap from the center.
Stansbury used to be a defensive tackle for the Trenton BIC (Brothers in Christ) and now coaches the squad, which lost by one point in last season’s championship game to the Las Vegas Insomniacs. Today, Trenton takes on the East Orange Renegades, so there’s local pride on the line, North Jersey vs. South Jersey.
The back of players’ jerseys spell out nicknames instead of surnames. There’s Hercules, Jookz, Baby Thor. A sturdy running back on the BIC goes by Ice Cream Truck. And from the first whistle, the trash talk is relentless. Verbal jabs range from the basics (“You soft, little bro”) to the modern (“I got 10,000 views on your ass’) to the downright personal (“You smell weird. How you musty on a Sunday?”). After the coin toss, the teams gather on opposite sides of the field. Stansbury ends his pre-game speech with a booming message: “Knock somebody the fuck out.”
Some of the hits that follow look painful, but nobody lowers their head, and everybody gets up quickly. Without pads, the contact is more physical than what you see on a typical NFL Sunday, but less violent. There’s a lot of grappling, and players go down slower. Defenders grab jerseys and wrap up opponents with their shoulders to gain leverage, like in rugby. Tackles sound different too, without the cruel crunch of helmets colliding. “When you take off the helmet, you remove the invincibility,” says A7FL co-founder Sener Korkusuz. Here, the intensity runs high, but the volume is more muted.
“Without the pads, it’s still pretty good. A lot of arm tackling, slamming, that kind of thing,” says Trenton quarterback and reigning league MVP Sterry Codrington. Prior to joining the A7FL, Codrington played defensive back in a German pro league. He’s one of the more accomplished guys in the league, which features a variety of skill levels. A number of players bring college experience. Meanwhile, Dondre Haynes, a 6’7” defensive lineman and tight end for the Renegades, works as a mailman and never played organized ball in high school or college. Michael Walker, who goes by “Hersch” as a nod to NFL Hall of Famer Herschel Walker, is 61 years old and still active in the league for the BIC even though he’s retired from the actual workforce.
The last time these teams played, Trenton routed East Orange 44-0, but today they trade scores, ending the first half tied at 19. The Renegades boast some new players including Anthony Service, a former D3 quarterback at Western New England who graduated in 2018 with the school record for touchdown passes. Service hadn’t played a down of tackle since then, but joined the league after hearing about it from friends on a flag football team.
It’s a common story across the A7FL, which has grown steadily by word of mouth. Without a draft, each team handles their own recruiting, and good players with college and pro pedigree boost the legitimacy of the A7FL, which could persuade even better players to join.
“The people that see it, they love it because it’s a little rough around the edges,” DePaul says. “This is organic football.”
The relevance of A7FL’s vision of football depends on how concerned you are about the sport’s status quo and how important tackling is to your enjoyment of it. There appears to be more public awareness about concussions and CTE, but the existential threat of player safety seems like more of a long-term issue. NFL games remain enormously popular, accounting for 72 of the 100 most watched TV broadcasts in America last year. Other football leagues, like the XFL and USFL (which merged into the UFL and began play in March of 2024), have popped up in recent years trying to capture some of that attention during the NFL’s offseason. Full-contact entertainment thrives in other sports as well, like the UFC and even Power Slap, the upstart slap fighting league owned by UFC CEO Dana White.
In 2019, the A7FL brought on David Isaacs, who helped found the UFC, to head the league’s advisory board. Isaacs saw potential for the A7FL to carve out a distinct following in football culture. “That was the thing that UFC had early: It looked rougher… but it’s actually safer,” he says. “We're like a tiny speck of whatever compared to the NFL. But I think the NFL's problems with CTE are existential. I think this is reverberating throughout the league, and I don't think they've done a great job at it.”
“If you ask the lay person about helmets and football and concussions, they'd say, ‘Yes, helmets definitively reduce the risk of concussion.’ But it didn't seem like that's really the case,” says Dr. Pavan Patel, a neurologist who worked with the University of Florida football team during a fellowship at the school’s College of Medicine. “A helmet gives you a false sense of security sometimes where you think you can just go all out and go helmet first, head first, and you'll be fine.”
An NFL spokesperson told me the league has never considered eliminating helmets. “Helmets are just one aspect of the NFL’s holistic approach to reduce concussions and head impacts,” the spokesperson says. “That strategy also includes rule changes, research into better understanding of concussion causing events, education related to proper technique, and the expansion of the Guardian Cap mandate.”
According to NFL data, concussions decreased by nearly 17% from 2023 to 2024, and have trended downward since the league first made the data public in 2015. The newer Guardian Cap, which offers extra padding compared to standard helmets, reportedly improves protection against concussions. However, researchers at Stanford and the University of Wisconsin have published studies that cast doubts on the benefits.
The A7FL doesn’t track injury data, and there’s not much research on no-helmet football. The most notable study comes from researchers at the University of New Hampshire, who followed 50 D1 college players over the 2015 season and found that helmetless tackling drills in practice reduced impact to the head by 28 percent.
Compared to the UFLs of the world, the A7FL needs to work harder to explain how it works and build buzz with new fans. It exists in a different tier than other tackle football leagues, with tinier stadiums and smaller crowds. Most players don’t get paid. They’ve partnered with local TV networks and smaller streaming services like DAZN and Fox Soul—and are on the hunt for a big media rights deal—but, for now, the easiest way to watch a game is on a YouTube livestream. Still, the A7FL has managed to survive and fill a niche for over a decade while other leagues have not.
“It turns out when you look exactly like the NFL but your football isn't nearly as good, it's not so interesting,” Isaacs says. “There is room for alternatives. But I don't think the alternative can be RC Cola to the NFL's Coca-Cola.”
At halftime in Asbury Park, some guys chug water and move around to stay warm, some players vape, and some suck on orange slices. With the score tied, the Renegades are hyped, ready to take the field and build on their momentum. Across the sidelines, BIC players are pissed, arguing with each other about what adjustments to make.
Tomorrow, they’ll clock in to regular jobs — cops, security guards, high school coaches — to make ends meet. Codrington, the reigning MVP, is a truck driver. Kyle Ward, a sure-handed wide receiver for the Renegades, works as a personal trainer, Lyft driver, shipping manager for a plastics company, and also plays in a professional arena football league. For the next hour, though, winning is all they care about.
The BIC score the only touchdown in the third quarter to take the lead. In the fourth quarter, Dondre Haynes, the massive mailman with quick feet, catches a short pass behind the defense and gallops in for a 60-yard touchdown that ties the game. Both teams trade scores again and head to overtime.
After the BIC march in for a quick touchdown, Ward streaks into the end zone to bring the Renegades within one. They line up for a two-point conversion to finish the game. Service, their new quarterback, fires a low throw to a receiver in the back of the end zone, but it bobbles out of his hands. The BIC win 40-39.
As both sides line up to shake hands after the game, most guys show love to each other. Two guys start arguing and almost have to be separated, but as they move to the parking lot, guys from both teams huddle up. One player serves Mexican food on the hood of his car. They talk more trash. The vibes are good. Nobody got injured.
