BillsFanSD

It also helps that New England just isn't a particularly good team. I honestly think we could simply go with the exact same game plan from last time and win a pretty straightforward contest. The team's mental state is really the only unknown variable here. The talent gap is large and known.

I was talking about the Patriots game, not the Bengals game. Sorry about that -- I should have clarified since this is still the "Bengals game" thread.

Well, there's no (good) reason why the Bills shouldn't play this weekend. Sean Taylor, etc. I'm admittedly dismissing this possibility out of hand, as I think everyone should. Today is fine. Dragging it out absolutely does impact the league -- the NFL's decision has a direct and immediate effect on the Bills, Bengals, and Chiefs, and it has various indirect effects on the Ravens, Dolphins, Patriots, and maybe the Jaguars but they probably truck Tennessee this weekend anyway and it won't matter for them. And maybe the Steelers, possibly. It's not an exaggeration to say that it affects the entire AFC playoff bracket, which kicks off in 9 days. But yeah a decision today is totally okay. I was criticizing a post about waiting to make a decision until after week 18 is played out, which is what I'm objecting to.

Great news coming from the physicians treating him. Very glad to hear this, obviously.

Hopefully people in the league office are also being a little more forward-looking and thinking about whether they're also going to postpone games in the future when (a) a player is paralyzed on the field, (b) a player is killed in car accident, (c) a player is murdered in his home, (d) a position coach dies of a massive heart attack, etc. They obviously didn't think any of this stuff through when they postponed the game on Monday night, but that was understandable because they had to make a snap decision under pressure. There's no excuse for poor foresight now.

I'm not a doctor, but I'm very active on another football-related forum where three different doctors have provided extensive commentary on this injury and the general prognosis for somebody of Hamlin's age who suffered this injury and received X treatment at Y time, etc. All three of them were optimistic about Hamlin's survival, but they all completely disregarded the "making progress" thing and one became significantly more pessimistic due to the lack of any specifics. What I mean by that is that families often interpret basic reflex reactions as "making progress" when in fact they are very negative signs. Again, I'm not qualified to discuss this in anything resembling detail and for all I know Hamlin actually is improving. Just passing it along.

Yep. And besides, the purpose of the injury report is so that both teams are fairly informed about each player's game availability and fitness. Everybody knows about Damar Hamlin. (I know the person who raised this issue was just asking out curiosity and this is maybe a little pedantic, but nobody can seriously accuse the Bills of trying to slip one past the Patriots. They know that Hamlin won't be out there on Sunday.)

Honestly, who cares? All three of those alternatives probably result in KC getting the #1 seed. The only difference is that a loss/forfeit gives us (probably) the #3 seed instead of #2. That's not that big a deal. I mean, yeah, it matters, but it shouldn't be a deal-breaker under the circumstances.

This is 100% bush league. A basic, fundamental principle of decision-making in competitive situations is that you have a rule that everybody knows up front, and you follow it. Waiting to see how things shake out and then backwards-engineering a rule based on the results is the exact opposite of what we should expect from middle schoolers, let alone professional adults running a multi-billion dollar business.

This seems like an odd thing to say under the circumstances, but I don't people fully grasp the severity of this injury. We won't even know if Hamlin is going to survive until later today or tomorrow. But that's just one part of it. His long-term prognosis is 100% totally up in the air. He could play for the Bills next year, or he may never live independently ever again. We won't find that out for a long time. Certainly not by this weekend.

Probably IR.

Maybe, but this is a childish way of doing it. All of us know or should know that Hamlin's health and the league calendar are completely independent of each other. There's no good reason to coddle people who don't understand that. (Honestly, the constant need to accommodate the dumbest among us is one of the main sources of my frustration with modern culture).

This is one of about a dozen solutions that are perfectly reasonable. At this point, the league needs to just pick one and be done with it. This is one of those times when it's much better to make a good-enough decision quickly than make a perfect decision later. It's stupid and unprofessional to let this hang out there.

Okay fair enough. My apologies for the expletive.

You quoted me.

My parents and I got back in the car and went our way, which was to one of my college visits four hours down the road. Dial it back a little with your own sense of importance. Seriously, you're right that it's not the biggest deal in the world. Give the Bills a loss and just move on, no problem. I'm tired of twenty-somethings explaining the deep secrets of life to me. Get bent and enjoy your own old age when you'll come around.

I doubt that too. Professional football players are human beings, just like you and me. Very adults would be wiling to say "I know you saw somebody on fire from a car accident, but my trauma is worse than yours." Like, not a soul would say that.

I saw somebody earlier on Twitter nominating McDermott and Taylor for co-coaches of the year. That would honestly be pretty cool. Both of these guys have done a great job with their respective franchises, and they were leaders on Monday night in a way that some other coaches wouldn't have been. Edit: For the record, I'm talking specifically about Mike McDaniel and Andy Reid. I'm glad, and the league is almost certainly glad, that neither of those gentlemen was on the sideline for this game.

I'll bet they would all recite that post back to you. You mentioned Dane Jackson. He was nearly paralyzed earlier this season and he's back out there. Edit: Also, Diggs took it upon himself to be the guy who gets his teammates back into game mode on Monday night. I think you might have picked two of the worst possible examples to support the argument you're trying to make.

This is a fair point, and it weighs with me when it comes to how we handled the game on Monday. I respect McDermott and Taylor. If they felt like their players were not in a position to continue, fine. I will totally defer to their judgement. I wasn't there and I didn't see what their players saw. I get how players may have been in shock. It's understandable. 48 hours later, though, and we're into a situation that I and a whole bunch of other people have experience with. (Edit: For full disclosure, so people don't get the wrong idea, my parents, wife, and kids are all just fine. Admittedly my parents are old, but that beats the alternative. My moments of "trauma" amount to two very bad car accidents in which I was a third party who had to stick around for a police report, two longtime colleagues who dropped dead a few years apart, a close friend of my daughter's who killed somebody in a DUI and went to prison, and my mom being in bicycle accident that landed her in the ICU with a brain injury for five days. I'm not special and I expect that I would lose a trauma contest to lots of other posters.)

Unfortunately no. It's the other SD. The cold and windy one.

The pandemic dramatically sped this process up, because we were all rightly concerned about the mental health of people who were socially isolated, jobless, dealing with home-bound kids, just dealing with having the world turned upside down, or whatever. But I think this is being driven by social changes that were already in motion before the pandemic. I'm 50 so that makes me old, and when I say that these social changes are for the worse, people will understandably write that off as "old man yells at clouds." On the other hand, I'm old enough to have experienced trauma and personal loss. Everyone my age has done so. Co-workers die, parents die, friends die, and the expectation has always been that you take a moment to grieve in your own way and then you move on. This kind of psychological collapse was always reserved for the death of a child or spouse. I can't wrap my mind around breaking down every time a colleague suffers a grievous injury. At my age, I don't even have time for all that.

I hadn't thought about this angle. Why wouldn't the Bengals just forfeit such a game? They can't actually rest all their starters -- nobody can. I would think they would object to a meaningless (for them) makeup game under the strongest possible terms. Imagine losing an OL in such a game.

The thing that's irritating about this is that it's completely predictable to the point of total certainty that something like this would happen eventually. For the life of me, I do not understand why the NFL is so consistently myopic and reactionary and can't think ahead to how to handle this kind of situation. It really isn't hard to come up with some general policy parameters for this. First of all, you need to make sure that it's a system that can't be gamed. For the MNF game, we were only halfway through the first quarter, so the game had barely even started and this isn't a concern. But you don't want to create an incentive for a team to exaggerate an injury in the fourth quarter of a 47-3 blowout as a way of generating a no-contest or something. So make it a call from New York based on some well-publicized guidelines for when play stops and when play continues. It could be as simple as "spinal injury or on-field resuscitation = stop; anything else = go." Just enough to stop gamesmanship. Second, you need a plan for how you deal with the game that got cancelled. "Score at the time of cancellation" is fine. "Tie" is fine. "Coin flip" is fine. "No contest" is fine. "The injured player's team loses" is fine. It could depend on how much time is left in the game -- that's fine. Just have a rule and stick to it. This making-it-up-as-you-go-along business is bush league. Even a suboptimal rule is better than what the league is doing now, because the suboptimal rule will at least be transparent and known to all parties in advance. Third, you need leeway for the commissioner to handle unforeseen contingencies. All this needs is a clause like "The commissioner has the authority the adjust any of these procedures when he or she determines that doing so is in the best interests of the league" or somesuch. If the commissioner abuses that authority, you have the wrong commissioner and that's not a problem that can be solved with policy. I think that's really about it. This policy doesn't have to be complicated. It just needs to exist.

Obviously this is a very different situation considering the state of the team, but we did go all-out for the #2 seed in 2020, didn't we?