Between every yard mattering and giving the kids 30-60 seconds to rest between each 5-20 sec play, there’s just not much that can be done.
It’s inheiritantly unsafe for multiple reasons.
It’s worse to stop, recover, and continue after a hit to the head just to take more.
Ever play is 100% full speed.
Every hit is maximum effort.
Illusion of safety from pads.
You couldn’t design a sport to maximize head trauma and do much better than football.
Ironically rugby alleviates all those issues, and as a result is much safer despite obviously still have some dangers.
Like, I saw a guy get his tooth broken off and stuck in another teammates head. I touched it, it was fucking stuck. But we were in the middle of a tournament and were already going to be down two people. So the guy who lost the tooth drove the guy with his tooth in his head to the ER. We couldn’t spare a healthy person to drive them.
No sport is going to be 100% safe. But to make football safe, it’s not going to resemble modern football in any meaningful way.