Spearing is a dangerous and illegal move in contact sports where a player uses the top of their head or equipment as a weapon. In football, it means deliberately lowering your head and driving the crown of your helmet into another player. In ice hockey, it means jabbing an opponent with the blade of your stick. Both carry serious penalties, but football spearing gets the most attention because of its direct link to catastrophic spinal cord injuries.
Spearing in Football
A football player commits spearing by dropping their head to roughly 30 degrees or less from the ground and initiating contact with the top of the helmet. This turns the helmet from protective gear into a battering ram. The foul applies whether the player is tackling, blocking, or hitting someone after the play. It can be called on offensive and defensive players alike.
The key distinction is head position. A legal tackle involves keeping the head up and making initial contact with the shoulder or chest. Spearing happens when a player tucks their chin, points the crown of the helmet at an opponent, and launches into them. Even if the head drop happens a split second before contact and isn’t fully intentional, officials can still flag it.
Why Spearing Is So Dangerous
The human cervical spine has a natural inward curve that acts like a spring, absorbing and distributing force. When you flex your neck forward about 30 degrees, that curve disappears. The spine becomes a straight column, and any impact to the top of the head sends compressive force directly down through the vertebrae with nowhere to go.
Here’s what happens mechanically: the helmet absorbs some initial force, but once the padding reaches its limit, the head actually reverses direction slightly. Meanwhile the torso is still moving forward. The cervical spine gets compressed between the skull and the oncoming body mass. Research on cadaver specimens found that at the moment of this axial-load impact, spinal segment height decreased by an average of 8.9 mm, and the spinal canal was completely blocked in 8 out of 10 specimens. The vertebrae buckle, producing sudden large angles within the spine that damage bone, discs, ligaments, and the spinal cord itself.
The injuries range from temporary to permanent. A “stinger,” the most common nerve injury, causes shooting pain and weakness in one arm and typically resolves within minutes. Cervical cord neuropraxia is more serious: temporary pain, tingling, or weakness in multiple limbs that can take up to 48 hours to fully clear. At the extreme end, spearing can cause permanent paralysis or death. The mechanism behind the most catastrophic cases is almost always forced hyperflexion, exactly the motion involved in a spear tackle.
Penalties Across Football Levels
Spearing carries a 15-yard penalty at every level of organized football. Beyond that, consequences escalate with the severity of the hit and the level of play.
- High school: 15-yard penalty. Especially dangerous or repeated acts can result in ejection.
- College (NCAA): 15-yard penalty. The NCAA eliminated “spearing” as a standalone foul category in 2005, folding it into broader targeting rules. A targeting call is automatically reviewed by video, and if upheld, the player is ejected and may be suspended for part or all of the next game.
- NFL: 15-yard penalty. The league prohibits using any part of the helmet (crown, forehead, or facemask) to butt or ram an opponent. Repeat or egregious offenders face fines and game suspensions. The rules specifically protect defenseless players: quarterbacks throwing a pass, receivers catching the ball, runners already in a tackler’s grasp, and kick returners fielding the ball in the air.
- CFL (Canadian): Penalizes using the helmet to butt, ram, or spear any opponent, with specific protections for passers, receivers, and downed ball carriers.
The 1976 Rule Change
Spearing was formally banned in American high school and college football in 1976, a response to a wave of catastrophic head and neck injuries. The rule change is widely credited with reducing the number of those injuries over the following decades. However, the picture is more complicated than it appears. A study comparing spearing incidents during a high school’s 1975 and 1990 seasons found that the rule change did not appear to have a favorable impact on how often spearing actually occurred during games. The penalty changed the official stance, but eliminating the behavior on the field required deeper changes in how the game was coached and played.
How Safe Tackling Prevents Spearing
The modern alternative to spearing is often called “heads-up” tackling. The National Athletic Trainers’ Association recommends initiating contact with the chest or shoulder while keeping the head in an upright posture. The tackler aims for the offensive player’s near shoulder, keeping their own head to the inside so it doesn’t cross in front of the runner’s body and momentum.
Research on NCAA Division I tackles found that maintaining a head-up position naturally raises the point of contact to at or above the ball carrier’s waist. This matters because higher contact points reduce the chance of the tackler’s head being driven downward into axial loading. Head up means the cervical spine keeps its natural curve, which means it can absorb force the way it’s designed to. Programs like USA Football’s “Heads Up Football” and Atavus’s rugby-style tackling curriculum have built entire coaching systems around this principle, drilling the habit of seeing what you hit rather than leading with the crown.
Spearing in Ice Hockey
In hockey, spearing is an entirely different action but equally illegal. It means stabbing an opponent with the point of the stick blade, typically aimed at the stomach, legs, or groin. A player can also be called for using the stick in a lifting motion to strike someone in the groin area. Crucially, contact doesn’t have to be made for a penalty to be assessed.
NHL penalties for spearing follow a tiered system:
- No contact: A 4-minute double-minor penalty for a clear attempt to spear, even if the stick misses.
- Contact made: A 5-minute major penalty plus an automatic game misconduct, meaning the player is ejected.
- Injury caused: A match penalty, the most severe in-game punishment, which removes the player and triggers a league review that can lead to further suspension.
The harshness of these penalties reflects how deliberate spearing usually is. Unlike some hockey infractions that happen in the flow of play, jabbing someone with a stick blade is almost always intentional and carries real risk of internal injury, particularly to the abdomen.