Monday night may have brought us the most terrifying moment in NFL history.
Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin was tackling Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins, and it appeared to be just a routine tackle.
However, Hamlin got up for one second, and proceeded to fall right back down, collapsing unconscious on the football field.
Medical staff immediately rushed their way onto the field to an unconscious Damar Hamlin… his heart had stopped beating. After administering CPR, AED, and giving him oxygen for around 10 minutes, they were able to restart his heart.
Players, coaches, and fans looked on in horror, trying to make sense of what was happening.
The 24-year-old was then taken to the University of Cincinnati Hospital where he remains in critical condition. Damar’s uncle confirmed that he had to be resuscitated twice, however now is down to using 50% oxygen on a ventilator, as opposed to the 100% medical staff was utilizing Monday night.
While he remains in critical condition in the ICU, this is a positive development that he’s starting to breathe on his own:
Needless to say, everybody was offering their thoughts and prayers for Damar Hamlin and his family, and the majority of people wanted the game to either be postponed or canceled.
However, Undisputed co-host Skip Bayless made a lot of people upset with this one tweet:
“No doubt the NFL is considering postponing the rest of this game – but how? This late in the season, a game of this magnitude is crucial to the regular-season outcome… which suddenly becomes irrelevant.”
As you can imagine people were not happy with that one.
Bayless went on Undisputed the next day, with no co-host Shannon Sharpe in sight, to send out a strange apology for going on with the show as scheduled:
Allow me to say upfront, that I apologize for what we’re going to set out to do here today, if it offends anyone, because we’re gonna try to do the show pretty much as we usually do the show. But I’ll admit upfront, I’m still shook up by what happened last night to Damar Hamlin.
In fact, I’m still wrecked. In fact, I’m not sure I’m capable of doing this show today. But after barely sleeping on it, I decided to give it a try. Maybe I’ll fail, maybe we will fail, but we’re going to try. We wrestled through much of the night if we should even do a show today, because it felt like in our minds, we almost can’t win with this.
Because, the last thing we want to try to do is come off as insensitive to what this young man is going through in a lone life or death situation. The last thing we want to do is offend anyone, by trying to do what we always do, which is talk about sports.
As this show goes on, we’re going to try to talk about a little bit of sports, but we’re gonna continue to talk about what happened to this young man last night, and try to sort back through it, with help from you and the audience.
And we ask you now, if you’d like to tweet us your emotions from the night, and of this morning, about what happened to Damar Hamlin, please do so.”
People began to speculate that Shannon Shapre skipped the show because he was pissed at Skip for the insensitive tweet, while others suggested it was out of respect for Damar.
It was probably a little of both…
With that being said, Shannon Sharpe joined Skip once again for this morning’s show, where he discussed his reasoning for his absence yesterday morning, and it didn’t take long for the fireworks between Skip and Shannon to ignite.
“There’s been a lot of speculation of why I wasn’t on air yesterday, and I won’t get into speculation or conjecture, or innuendo, but I will say this, watching that game on Monday night, what happened to Damar Hamlin struck me a little different.
As a brotherhood in the NFL, when injuries happen, when we know injuries are part of the game. I’ve seen guys suffer ACLs, Achilles tear, but I’ve never seen anybody have to be revived and fight for their life on the field, so it struck me a little differently because I remember seeing my brother paralyzed momentarily and revived on the field, temporarily, and he was able to reclaim focus.
Skip tweeted something, although I disagree with the tweet, and hopefully Skip will take it down….”
Skip proceeded to cut off Sharpe, saying he wasn’t going to delete the tweet, because he stood by what he said and nobody had a problem with it in the studio.
That’s when Sharpe gets incredibly frustrated, saying:
“I mean I cannot even get through a monologue without you interrupting me… No, I was just gonna say Skip, I didn’t want to yesterday, to get into a situation where the Damar Hamlin was the issue.
We should be talking about him, and not getting into your tweet. That’s what I was gonna do. But you can’t even let me finish my opening monologue without you interrupting.”
Honestly, it kind of sounds like Skip and Shannon might be coming to the end of their time together.
Let’s continue to keep Hamlin and his family in your thoughts and prayers.
