Large animal contusion models of spinal cord injury are an essential precursor to developing and evaluating treatment options for human spinal cord injury. Reducing variability in these experiments has been a recent focus as it increases the sensitivity with which treatment effects can be detected while simultaneously decreasing the number of animals required in a study. Here, we conducted a detailed review to explore if head and neck positioning in a cervical contusion model of spinal cord injury could be a factor impacting the biomechanics of a spinal cord injury, and thus, the resulting outcomes. By reviewing existing literature, we found evidence that animal head/neck positioning affects the exposed level of the spinal cord, morphology of the spinal cord, tissue mechanics and as a result the biomechanics of a cervical spinal cord injury. We posited that neck position could be a hidden factor contributing to variability. Our results indicate that neck positioning is an important factor in studying biomechanics, and that reporting these values can improve inter-study consistency and comparability and that further work needs to be done to standardize positioning for cervical spinal cord contusion injury models.