Troy Vincent denies NFL initially gave Bills-Bengals 5-minute warmup window after Damar Hamlin’s injury
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The injury to Buffalo Bills defensive back Damar Hamlin gripped the entire sports world Monday night. The city of Pittsburgh, in particular, watched with concern as the former Pitt Panther and Pittsburgh Central Catholic graduate collapsed on the field in Cincinnati after making a tackle of Bengals receiver Tee Higgins.
Through tears, Hamlin’s Buffalo Bills teammates watched as the 24-year-old needed CPR on the field.
I’m told Damar Hamlin has a pulse, but is not breathing on his own. He is being transported to UC.
Needed AED and CPR on the field.
— Joe Danneman (@FOX19Joe) January 3, 2023
Via ESPN.com’s timeline, Hamlin was taken off the field in an ambulance at 9:25 p.m. The game was postponed at roughly 10:01 p.m. Via video shown on ESPN, a phone call took place that involved NFL officials and the head coaches of both teams, presumably with the NFL league offices giving word that the game would be postponed.
Shortly after that video was aired, the network broadcast announced the game was canceled. Moments thereafter, another announcement was made in the stadium. Many on Twitter went after the NFL for not canceling the game more quickly.
Postponing this game should not take this long.
— Ari Meirov (@MySportsUpdate) January 3, 2023
ESPN reporting the Bills/Bengals game has officially been suspended.
Took too long to announce but the right decision.
— Alex Kozora (@Alex_Kozora) January 3, 2023
Dawg cancel the game
— Adrian Phillips (@Phillips_17) January 3, 2023
CANCEL THE GAME ALREADY.
— Robert Griffin III (@RGIII) January 3, 2023
I am begging the NFL to cancel this game. Please.
— Marcus Mosher (@Marcus_Mosher) January 3, 2023
Part of the public agitation was that at least one report — while the players were still on the field — was that the players were going to be given five minutes to warm up and the game would resume.
However, upon a meeting between game officials and head coaches Zac Taylor (Cincinnati) and Sean McDermott (Buffalo), the players were pulled off the field.
That’s what seemed to really send social media into a lather.
The way the @NFL handled this was bad. The game should’ve been canceled. Five minutes back on the field? It took you an hour to come to the sense let’s cancel the game. Nah that’s a bad look.
— Nathan M. Snell (@1NathanSnell) January 3, 2023
Whose call was it to give each team 5 minutes?! Only five minutes to regroup. Cancel the game NFL. Take care of your players
— kristy ambrose (@kristyambrose) January 3, 2023
@NFL Cancel or postpone this game. It is too hard for them to play. This is a game that is dangerous or can be. The five minutes given at first was too little to begin with and not a good look. Let these men stop working. This is a job.
— Karen Phillips (@KLP4Titans) January 3, 2023
Five minutes to warm up? Cancel the game
— Mercer County Sports (@TheSportsBoard) January 3, 2023
The way the public seems to be spinning the story is to excoriate the NFL for how it handled the situation because it didn’t cancel the game in a timely enough manner to make those of us on Twitter feel comfortable. For now, though, we have no idea what that five-minute warm-up window on the field was really all about. In fact, NFL executive vice president of communications, public affairs and policy, Troy Vincent, denied that it was even discussed.
“I’m not sure where that came from,” Vincent said via a transcription from ProFootballTalk.com. “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.”
Aside from that statement, at the time of this post, no one has commented on what went on in those conversations or in the time from when the severity of Hamlin’s injury was clear.
Was that the on-field officials doing what they thought they had to do until further word came from New York? Was it simply stalling to get more clarity from New York before the field was eventually cleared?
Was the meeting with the coaches actually Taylor and McDermott telling the refs, “No, we aren’t playing,” as so many have assumed? Or was it them lobbying to get off the field until they heard more details about the fallen player, instead of making the players stand out there and wait?
Related:
• Pittsburgh native Damar Hamlin in critical condition after cardiac arrest during game
• Prayers, thoughts, donations to Damar Hamlin’s foundation pour in after his collapse
• From 2021: Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, former Pitt player, hosts toy drive in McKees Rocks
As Stephen A. Smith pointed out on ESPN on the coverage after the game, we have become hardened to moments like this. We have seen so many cases of players leaving in ambulances to later learn that those players who were injured regained consciousness in the ambulance or at the hospital. As a result, perhaps there was an unrealistic level of optimism that such word would reach the stadium and the game could reasonably resume.
Once it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, any number of reasons could have been responsible for the time lag so many people seem to be outraged about today. Consider for a moment some of the information the league needed to gather before it made an informed, orderly announcement. It needed to:
• Be in touch with on-field medical personnel at the hospital
• Try to get in touch with Hamlin’s family
• Communicate with the NFL Players Association about how to handle a cancellation/postponement
• Discuss with the Bills how long they should stay in Cincinnati before heading home or if they were going to wait a day to resume a game
• Tell the coaches, so they could tell the players what the decision was going to be in terms of a postponement, cancellation, forfeit, tie … whatever
• Communicate with ESPN so they could tell tens of millions of viewers what was happening and why they made the decision that was made
They had to do that in 35 minutes. We just fired off tweets from our living rooms because we wanted a decision to align with our collective definition of propriety and perception of proper optics.
“Too long” to make a decision? For who? Us watching television?
Why do our interpretations of the timeline matter? Hamlin’s family, his teammates, the members of both organizations matter. And, in the end, the right decision was made.
If, in time, details do come out that the NFL was trying to force the teams to play, then let’s revisit this conversation and ridicule the league executives at that point. They’d deserve it.
But for now, it seems like a lot of people used Twitter, not as a way to stay informed of Hamlin’s health, but as a way to leverage out their own opinions of how his health was being handled.
When, really, that was all uninformed speculation.
The irony is a lot of social media was complaining about a timeline Monday night. Many people were furious that the NFL acted too slowly. I’d argue a race to prioritize the blame-game over the health of a badly injured player is a classic example of keyboard cowboys rushing to judgment too quickly.