NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell held his annual Super Bowl press conference on Friday (5 February) where he spoke about the concussion issue in the sport.

SOUNDBITE (English): Roger Goodell, NFL Commissioner, on how the NFL is dealing with the concussion issue:

"The concussion issue is something we've been focused on for several decades. We've learned more from science, we've learned more by our own experience and we have made great progress. We continue to make rule changes in our game to make the game safer and protect our players from unnecessary injury. Acts that we see can lead to increased probability of an injury - we've had 39 of those rule changes in the last 10 years, the most active period I think in that area. We've also made tremendous improvements with equipment. There's technology that's coming in, there will be a new helmet coming out this season that is part and comes from a GE/NFL/Under Armour challenge, which I think is going to be very positive step in trying to get better protection. We have also seen it in equipment. The same challenge resulted in one of the winners being a new technology that goes under artificial turf which will take out the impact and we have a large number of concussions that occur from just the head on the turf. So we're seeing a lot of great changes that are leading to positive changes and making the game safer. We're also investing aggressively in research so that we can get the answers to perplexing problems that we don't all have, including science. But we're not going to wait for science. We're gonna get out and we're going to make changes in our game and we've seen the benefits of that, we've seen the positive changes."