Horse 1194 - Would NFL Be Safer Without Helmets?

I've just been watching the first State of Origin Rugby League match between NSW and Queensland for 2011 and was wondering about this though experiment proposed by the Wall Street Journal in 2009; namely:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574527881984299454.html
This football season, the debate about head injuries has reached a critical mass. Startling research has been unveiled. Maudlin headlines have been written. Congress called a hearing on the subject last month.
...
But before the debate goes any further, there's a fundamental question that needs to be investigated. Why do football players wear helmets in the first place? And more important, could the helmets be part of the problem?

Watching the Rugby League tonight, it was startlingly obvious to me that the hits taken by players in a Rugby League match are nowhere near as rough as they are in a game of NFL, and I tend to wonder if helmets are part of the problem.
I also find it a little curious that the NFL season only lasts 17-weeks, and the matches are only 60 minutes of actual game time, as opposed to 80 minutes in a game of Rugby League and 120 minutes in an Australian Rules Football match.

The British Medical Association came to the conclusion in one of their reports, that the risk of serious injury and death caused by head trauma was actually lower in the days of bare-knuckle boxing. Because boxers would feel their own punches more without gloves they'd tend not to hit as hard. There are reports of prizefights lasting beyond the 6 hour mark. The link is below:
http://www.bma.org/ap.nsf/AttachmentsByTitle/PDFboxingdebate/$FILE/TheBoxingDebate.pdf

Then there is the curious tale of the Munich Taxicab Experiment, in which half of a fleet of taxicabs were fitted with ABS and half not. The drivers were then let loose but not told which cabs they had.


Among a total of 747 accidents incurred by the company's taxis during that period, the involvement rate of the ABS vehicles was not lower, but slightly higher,
...
Subsequent analysis of the rating scales showed that drivers of cabs with ABS made sharper turns in curves, were less accurate in their lane-holding behaviour, proceeded at a shorter forward sight distance, made more poorly adjusted merging manoeuvres and created more "traffic conflicts".
http://psyc.queensu.ca/target/chapter07.html

I'm wondering then, if NFL players didn't have helmets on, whether they'd be as likely to use their heads as battering rams the way they can do now, and whether or not the game would be made safer as a result?

This idea I imagine falls into the same sorts of questions as Risk Compensation, Risk Homeostasis and the Peltzman Effect, all of which are more to do with insurance risk questions than anything else, but it's still a good question.

Would NFL Be Safer Without Helmets? I wonder.