Opinion | Damar Hamlin Injury Tested Our Commitment to What Matters. The NFL Failed

In one of the NFL's most terrifying moments, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field. How we responded tells us who we are.

The NFL experienced one of the most terrifying moments in its history and one that put the fundamental nature of its business model under the microscope. Damar Hamlin, on an otherwise routine tackle of Tee Higgins, took a hit to the chest, stood up from the tackle, and subsequently collapsed.

Paramedics rushed to take care of Hamlin, who was later determined to have suffered a cardiac arrest, according to the official statement put out by the Buffalo Bills. The paramedics performed CPR and restored his heartbeat, according to multiple reports.

The on-air operation — both Troy Aikman and Joe Buck in the booth and Suzy Kolber, Booger McFarland, and Adam Schefter in the studio — struggled to fill the air, which hung with a stillness over the event.

They were asked to contextualize something that could not be contextualized. They said what needed to be said, made sure to focus on Hamlin’s health and his family, and tried to provide what scant updates were available to be provided over the time between the injury and the eventual official announcement to postpone the game.

During that time, there were camera shots of players in disbelief. Stefon Diggs and Tre’Davious White cried while Josh Allen stared into the distance. As time passed, more players gathered around Hamlin and knelt in prayer.

After the medical staff administered oxygen, a stretcher came out to move Hamlin. Then, soon after, an ambulance.

All the while, the broadcast bounced back and forth between the announcers at the game and the commentators in the studio, who were forced to repeat what they had said earlier in the absence of any new information with little new to add as commentary.

Up to this point, it was the most important game of the season. Two of the top three teams in the AFC were battling for the top seed. That was all made irrelevant as the brutal intervention of reality created a new, forced perspective.

The unfortunate reality is that this may continue to be the most important game we’ve seen in the NFL for reasons no one wishes were true.

The NFL Owes More to the Players That Make the Game

The NFL and its fans demand a lot from the players who play the game. The NFL is not the most brutal bloodsport in the world, or even in the United States, but it is the most popular.

It is also, due to the dynamics of the industry, bargaining power, and other market forces, one of the least fair labor-intensive industries. This is the product of a collectively bargained process where players lack leverage due to the lack of competition in the industry, the inability of the rank-and-file players to absorb a work stoppage, and the difficulty of players finding another industry to work in.

Players put their bodies on the line for the purposes of entertainment, and the end result is enrichment of an ownership class that collectively does less to create the product than a scout player on the practice squad does.

Labor-intensive industries are those that require more in labor inputs than capital inputs (often reduced to variable costs versus fixed costs). This is typically determined through revenue share, though that presents a complication when it comes to the NFL and other sports, where fixed bargaining percentages distort the number.

In the year 2000, labor-intensive industries like education, health care, professional services, and so on, split 67 to 83 percent of their industry’s revenue to labor. Capital-intensive industries like large-scale agriculture, high-tech manufacturing, materials mining, and utilities provided 28 to 31 percent of their revenue to labor.

While labor share has declined over time, it’s still the case that in labor-intensive industries, over 65 percent of revenue gets distributed to labor.

The NFL, which relies far more on labor than on capital to generate its product and its revenue, creates a salary cap that is calculated as 55 percent of its projected media money, 45 percent of its NFL Ventures (NFL Network, etc.) and postseason revenue, and 40 percent of local revenue.

But NFL teams don’t pay out their entire salary cap. In terms of cash paid out in 2019 compared to revenue received, the total was 38.9 percent.

While a good chunk of the rest of the revenue goes into things like non-player labor — coaches, referees, equipment staff, and so on — as well as investment in equipment, facilities, and so forth, we also know that the publicly available data on the Packers suggests that in 2015, 10 percent of the revenue the NFL made went into ownership as profit. 2017 data suggested an even higher profit of 14 percent, and the 2022 data demonstrated a 13 percent profit.

The Packers are an imperfect representation of the rest of the league, but the available data suggests they are actually close to the NFL average. Those enormous profit margins track with rising team values, too; the data here is also rough, but NFL team values since the year 2000 have risen from an average of $423 million per franchise to $4.4 billion.

That accords with recent team sales; the Broncos sold for $4.65 billion this year, while the Panthers sold for $2.3 billion in 2018, slightly below the 2018 estimate for the average value of an NFL franchise. And those rising revenues are a product of the profit potential of the NFL as well as the status symbol being an NFL owner provides.

That profit, revenue largely generated by the players, coaches, and operations staff that keep the game running, means less money for those that make the game work.

The cost that players take on is tremendous. NFL players live seven years shorter, on average, than baseball players. A short stint in the league could produce a short-term spike in income and long-term health effects.

While any discussion of player income is always cut short with cries about sympathy for millionaires (in apparent contrast with the billionaires who earn the remainder), most players in the NFL do not earn million-dollar incomes. Players like Damar Hamlin.

Most players get a three-year window to make a big impact on their finances and then must find another source of income. Given the singular focus that NFL-level athletes have on becoming football players, most do not have an easy way to earn money after their career is over — one reason why players’ associations and financial agents report that 78 percent of former players go broke.

After the game, former Steelers safety Ryan Clark offered an important perspective on ESPN’s Sportscenter.

“There’s probably nowhere else in the world [Hamlin] wanted to be. And now, he fights for his life,” Clark said. “Tonight, we got to see a side of football that is extremely ugly. A side of football that no one ever wants to see or ever wants to admit exists.”

“We should remember,” he said, “that these men are putting their lives on the line to live their dream. And tonight, Damar Hamlin’s dream became a nightmare for not only himself but his family and his entire team.”

Clark had his own near-death experience after practicing in high-altitude conditions. He has a condition known as a sickle-cell trait, which elevates risk in those conditions, and as a result, he was forced to spend time in a hospital.

He had to have his spleen and gallbladder removed, and the Steelers subsequently made sure to deactivate him before any road games they would have against the Denver Broncos, including a playoff affair. His teammates thought they had seen the last of him.

Perhaps the precarity of the health of the human beings tasked to play a game forces us to re-evaluate our commitment to it. But more than anything else, the people running the game have an incredible obligation to those that play it.

Damar Hamlin
Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen (17) and the Buffalo Bills react as Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin (3) is tended to on the field after a collision in the first quarter of a Week 17 NFL game against the Cincinnati Bengals, Monday, Jan. 2, 2023, at Paycor Stadium in Cincinnati.

The NFL Failed Damar Hamlin and the Players on the Field

The NFL announced Tuesday that the game would not be resumed this week — and perhaps not at all. If it is canceled, that would run counter to decades of precedence.

The NFL is well-known for its unmitigated desire to keep the game going at all costs. Players were told to play two days after receiving the news of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Nearly 40 years later, the NFL learned its lesson from that debacle and delayed games a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11.

Otherwise, the NFL has been loathe to delay or cancel games; they asked the Vikings and Seahawks to play through their cold-weather playoff game in an outdoor stadium where the wind chill reached negative 25 degrees. The Vikings were playing in that stadium because their previous stadium collapsed in 2010 — a fact that didn’t delay any games whatsoever.

The Browns and Bills this year played a game in Ford Field after an unprecedented snowstorm — the site of a Vikings home game in 2010 after the Metrodome collapse.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the NFL to reschedule 15 games in 2020 and three games in 2021.

They have rescheduled games in hurricanes and delayed some snow affairs, but they have largely developed a reputation of staying on task and keeping the game going, often hoping to wait out storms and having teams practice away from their facilities during hurricanes in the hopes of playing in their home stadiums on time.

This isn’t the first time the NFL has had alarming circumstances occur on-field. The NFL has even seen a player die on the field, with Chuck Hughes losing his life to a heart attack in 1971.

Reggie Brown, also of the Lions, suffered a spinal cord contusion in 1997 that left him paralyzed. Brown was motionless on the turf for 17 minutes and, according to receiver Herman Moore, was unconscious and turned blue before paramedics resuscitated him using CPR before intubating him and providing IV fluids.

The NFL made sure to complete both games.

That reputation is why it was easy to believe the ESPN, ESPN Deportes, and Westwood One broadcasts when they stated, a total of 10 times across all three broadcasts, that the NFL had given teams a five-minute warmup period before returning to play.

Troy Vincent, the NFL executive vice president of football operations, denied that this was communicated to officials. Per Andrew Marchand of the New York Post, ESPN responded: “There was constant communication between ESPN and league and game officials. As a result of that, we reported what we were told in the moment and immediately updated fans as new information was learned. This was an unprecedented, rapidly-evolving circumstance. All night long, we refrained from speculation.”

At the moment, there’s no way to resolve these seeming contradictions.

But it would be odd for Buck, a veteran broadcaster, along with his colleagues at ESPN Deportes and Westwood One, to get this wrong so consistently. Buck directly quoted what he was told, saying players were “given five minutes to quote-unquote ‘get ready,’ that’s the word we get from the league.”

Vincent is correct that this would have been an insensitive and ridiculous decision. That doesn’t stop the NFL from having made the decision. Players reacted like they were expected to play. On both sidelines, players put helmets back on and began to warm up on their own. The Bills’ defense took the field.

It wasn’t until Bengals head coach Zac Taylor crossed the field to talk to Bills coach Sean McDermott — leaving his offense on the sideline rather than the field — that a decision was apparently made that ended up allowing both teams to go back to their locker rooms.

In 2020, the NFL released a set of Health and Safety Protocols that all teams were required to adhere to, including an Emergency Action Plan. That Emergency Action Plan was referenced by Vincent when detailing the response to Hamlin’s injury.

As those protocols outline, “Every club is required to design and implement an Emergency Action Plan to follow in instances of severe trauma. These plans are reviewed by the NFL and NFLPA and must be approved by third-party experts prior to the start of each season. This plan, which the club is required to practice prior to the start of the season, also requires the home team to designate a Level One Trauma Center and to retain two certified crews of paramedics and advanced life support ambulances.”

That plan may have saved Hamlin’s life, as paramedic teams were quick to treat Hamlin, and they further had the capability of bringing Hamlin to the University of Cincinnati.

Having emergency plans in place is the bare minimum for a billion-dollar operation like the NFL. Still, it’s important to acknowledge that they had a plan in place, and it was executed well.

But it’s also the case that the NFL communicated, implicitly or otherwise, that they were trying to figure out ways to play the game after players on the field experienced something traumatizing. It took 43 minutes for the NFL to officially announce the suspension of the game after the game was paused. It should not have taken that long to come to the decision to cancel or postpone the game.

That the NFL either didn’t have a plan in place to swiftly suspend the game or seemingly waited for better news to come down the pipe is inexcusable.

But beyond that, the NFL hasn’t earned the benefit of the doubt. They fought to hide concussion data from players, they continue to bilk the players out of the revenue they generate, and they institutionally demand players play through some of the worst injuries a non-athlete can imagine, often leading to long-term struggles with pain and addiction.

Those 43 long minutes between the pause of the game and the official announcement were long and harrowing. They evoked reflection and prayer.

Hamlin’s injury forced us to evaluate, for ourselves, what’s important. Most responded to the call with empathy, kindness, and compassion. The NFL seemingly had to be dragged into the same.