no one knows how hard the hits can be better than blake lawrence.ormer lion backer for nebraska korn huhs kerrs. >> if -- korn huhs kerrs. if you had to bang your head into somebody and that was your job, that's your best weapon. if they said, "go and run and smash into the wall", i would do it for the sport. >> blake did it all his life. he started to question it after suffering three concussions. >> the third, which is the one where i realised something was wrong, was here. it was, "oh", and you start to get dizzy. >> dizzy, foggy. >> yes. >> you didn't know what you were. >> what's crazy is the coach came up and said, "great job", i did my job and had to sacrifices my brain to do it. >> when a player gets a concussion blow, the brain moves rapidly, the brain bouncing around in the skull. the nfl reports 50 players have been sidelined by concussions. for young place, multiple it by 1,000. each year more than 55,000 kids end up in the emergency room for football-related concussions. local news coverage of catastrophic head injuresies have ramped up

no one knows how hard the hits can be better than blake lawrence, former starting linebacker for theity of nebraska. >> my thir concussion was the one when i realized something was wrong was right here. after that play coach came up and said great job. i had to sacrifice my -- my brain to do it. >> reporter: so what kinds of hits are likely to land a player in the hospital rather than the end zone, and how do you refuse a player's risk of concussion? head of virginia's techs biomedical engineering department has spent the last decade studying the hokies to answer those questions. >> the mission is to understand what is happening and make the game better. >> reporter: what have you learned from this research so far? >> we can tell you very well, a college play whatever kind of exposure they are going to have. >> reporter: this is how he collects his raw data with the hits system for short. it picks up information from sensors placed in player's helmet. so the system is showing real time impacts right here. >> yeah, basically within a couple of seconds it will come in through this ante