BillsFanSD

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?

I agree. I'd be shocked if this isn't a national broadcast. Because of the whole situation with the Bills of course, but also it's a big game for New England and Miami.

I don't think it's worth it when you factor in having to play an additional game. The loser of a hypothetical Bills-Bengals restart is going to be made much worse off than if the league had simply assigned them a loss. The winner will be happy, but my guess is that both teams would reject this offer if they were given a reasonable alternative, such as a coin flip. If it were up to me as a fan, I would rather settle for the #3 seed with certainty and skip the Bengals game than replay that game while our potential next-week opponent gets a bye.

For the record, I wouldn't. I mean, I'll support the team in the same way that I support my adult children when they make decisions that I personally disapprove of, but I'll still disapprove.

After the season the Bills have had, I don't think this is true. This whole season has been one disaster after another. If we somehow win a championship against all odds, it will be one for the storybooks.

I think folks in the league office have probably war-gamed this just as much as we have, and they know that there's no possible outcome that everyone will agree is fair. They're laying the groundwork for that, and managing expectations.

This is a dumb idea that should have been firmly taken off the table yesterday morning. Nobody is doing anybody any favors by creating uncertainty about a game coming up in four days.

If we had simply lost to the Bengals and everyone held serve this week, the Chiefs would be the #1 seed despite losing H2H to both the #2 and #3 seeds. It kind of sucks, and I understand why is everybody is salty because they ended up with a very favorable divisional schedule and scraped out some ugly wins, but that's sports. It will just be that much sweeter when we end their season in their own stadium in front of their own fans.

Badly, as usual.

Brett Favre started a game the day after his dad died, and he was universally lionized for having done so.

I agree. And honestly, it's kind of amazing that the NFL doesn't have a plan in place for how to deal with a game that can't be played. This contingency is pretty darn predictable. On a side note though, this is why I favor the idea of using a coin flip to determine the "outcome" of CIN-BUF. It takes human decision-making out of the equation (aside from the meta-decision of flipping a coin to decide) and leaves the other 30 teams completely unaffected. From their vantage point, having this game decided by a coin flip is indistinguishable from having it played out on the field as usual. The only teams affected are us and the Bengals, and I think we'd both agree to settle it this way if the alternative is trying to shoehorn the game into the calendar somehow.

This was a freak injury that couldn't have realistically been avoided. The league has done a lot to try to protect players from head injuries. Allowing the QB to throw the ball away, for example, protects him from taking a big hit outside the pocket. That's good. And it makes sense, because football is obviously a sport that introduces players to a high risk of concussions. But there's nothing you can really do to prevent an incredibly rare cardiac event caused by a tackle. That's unavoidable and I don't see how you mitigate it.

They're not literally identical situations, but they're very similar for the reasons you mentioned. That game was played to its conclusion and the rest of the season moved along normally. All of us understood that various players may or may not have their head in exactly the right spot, but there was no call to cancel any games or rearrange the schedule on our behalf.

No, up until about five minutes ago, this was universally viewed as the healthiest course of action. We can draw on example after example from the sports world -- Kevin Everett, Sean Taylor, Brett Favre's dad, Christian Ericksen, etc. But more immediately, I'm sure I'm not the only person old enough to have dealt with stuff like this myself and to have seen my friends and coworkers deal with issues much worse than this one. Nobody ever counsels a friend to shut down -- we do the opposite, literally always. That doesn't mean you have to be totally stoic and stone-faced about it. But it does mean that you don't lock yourself in a room and mope around either. Friends tell friends not to do that.

What if Josh Allen had torn his knee instead of just tweaking it a little? Teams win games due to other players' injuries all the time. It's part of sports. If the league sticks the Bills with a L, in my mind it's just going to go directly into the "losses caused by injury" bucket, much like the Miami game. (To be clear, this isn't my preferred outcome. I'm just saying that it's not some kind of miscarriage of justice or anything).

The odds of them making this decision without consulting KC/BALT is approximately zero. Those teams absolutely have a valid right to provide input on this decision. They may not get their way (somebody is going to be stuck with an outcome they perceive as unfair), but they're just as much a party to this as our team is.

On the contrary, lots of us have had an opportunity to reflect on our own experiences and how we processed them, and we remembered that the healthiest way to move forward from a tragic event is to get on with it. That's not unsympathetic. It's just a different flavor of advice. More dad, less mom.

Maybe, but this has happened before. It's not unprecedented. It's not even unprecedented with the Buffalo Bills (Kevin Everett). It really is time to get on with it.