Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered an on-field cardiac arrest after taking a hit to the chest while tackling Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins last night.
Warning: GRAPHIC
After Hamlin collapsed, medical staff immediately showed up to the scene to provide AED, CPR and oxygen, as players gathered around to pray for their teammate and friend.
The 24-year-old former Pitt Panther was transferred in an ambulance to the University of Cincinnati Hospital after medical personnel was able to revive his heart. He has since been sedated and listed in critical condition.
After Hamlin was taken to the hospital, announcers at the game Joe Buck and Troy Aikman announced that they were told the teams were given a five minute warmup period by the NFL, and play would resume.
However, it was obviously clear that nobody on that field was ready to play another down last night, and the game needed to go ahead and get cancelled.
Bills head coach Sean McDermott, and Bengals head coach Zac Taylor spoke with each other, and spoke with officials, and from what we can gather, essentially told the NFL that they weren’t playing tonight. The game was eventually suspended, and ultimately postponed.
Still, the NFL received a lot of fire for even considering resuming the game, because if McDermott and Taylor wouldn’t have stepped in, that’s exactly what would’ve happened.
However, according to Pro Football Talk, the NFL is now completely denying that they ever said to resume play.
NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent told the outlet:
“I’m not sure where that came from. Frankly, there was no time period for the players to get warmed up.
Frankly, the only thing that we asked was that referee Shawn Smith communicate with both head coaches to make sure they had the proper time inside the locker room to discuss what they felt like was best.
So, I’m not sure where that came from. Five-minute warmup never crossed my mind, personally. And I was the one… that was communicating with the Commissioner.
We never, frankly, it never crossed our mind to talk about warming up to resume play. That’s ridiculous. That’s insensitive. And that’s not a place that we should ever be in.”
Well in that case, I’d really like to know where Joe Buck got the idea of players having “five minutes to warm up.” There’s no way he just made that up, and there was somebody else up there barking those orders.
Regardless, just the thought of resuming is awful in itself.
