BillsFanSD

My thoughts are that there's a good reason why Doug Whaley is not employed in the NFL anymore.

Seriously, what kind of a person would say "If something bad happens to me, I want everybody else to shut their lives down too?" Nobody ever says that. Spouses don't want their surviving spouse to live the rest of their life in a state of mourning after they pass. Why on earth would this situation be any different? People are making this out to be harder than it is. Damar Hamlin is fighting for his life in a hospital. For the rest of us, our life is still in front of us, and it's still ending one day at a time just like it was before. Let's get on with it.

I agree with you, and you'd think this would be obvious, but my hunch is that the NFL fully intends to fly by the seat of its pants this week. They could have made a decision and announced it yesterday pretty easily. The fact that they didn't makes me think that no announcement will be forthcoming until they see what happens in week 18. It's really kind of amazing that the league doesn't have a procedure in place for dealing with games that can't be played for one reason or another. I've belonged to fantasy leagues that had more thoughtful, forward-looking rules.

Players are already poked and prodded as part of the combine experience. They occasionally catch previously-undiagnosed issues. It's rare, but of course heart ailments among professional athletes are also quite rare. Regardless, I don't know that there was anything wrong with Hamlin's heart. My understanding is that this sort of thing could happen to anybody.

I can see a player rethinking his career after watching Tua get concussed over and over. Unfortunately, that's a real risk associated with football. I don't understand why anybody would have a similar reaction to Hamlin's injury. That was a freak accident that doesn't normally happen in this sport or any other sport. Retiring from football because of Hamlin's injury is like giving up exercise because one of your coworkers fell of his bike and suffered a brain injury. Actually, that would be less of an overreaction than the retirement thing.

Anecdotally, it seems like NFL players as a group are able to compartmentalize things like we all do. We've all seen lots of games where the ambulance had to come out for somebody, and within 10 minutes everybody is playing more or less normally. It would be interesting to dig back through those games and see to what degree the team with the injured player under-performed going forward. I don't think I've ever noticed an obvious pattern of teams dropping off, but of course my not noticing it doesn't mean that such a pattern isn't there.

Yeah, I mainly just joking about the Bills getting boned by the RNG in an improbable fashion.

There are no good options, but some options are obviously worse than others. From the Bills' standpoint, the worst "regular" outcome of Monday's night's game was a loss. That should be the floor on what the league does going forward. Buffalo should not have to accept a "solution" that's worse than just taking the loss and moving on. Playing an extra game while everyone else gets the week off is crazy. The Bills should not agree to that, and the league should not propose it.

So what? That was a very possible outcome anyway. This thing about giving everybody bye weeks except for Buffalo and Cincinnati was never going happen under any other circumstance and feels like something that you're devising for the express purpose of making life as difficult as possible for these two franchises. Why single them out like that?

This is actually a pretty good idea. I wish I had thought of this. Of course, we know they're going to land on Bills-Chiefs as the game that gets thrown out. Until that happens, though, it's a fun option to think about.

It's a big deal because you're punishing the two teams that were directly adversely affected by the injury. That's the opposite of what we should be looking to do.

The problem with this argument is that you could make the exact same argument about any solution. "How can you flip a coin while Hamlin is in the hospital?" "How can you resume the game with Hamlin in the hospital?" "How can you call it a tie with Hamlin in the hospital?" What happened to Damar sucks. It's tragic. But life doesn't stop just because of a tragedy, and the NFL is under the gun because it's already Tuesday of Week 18. It may feel gross, but they're going to have to make a decision and run with it.

This is a problem for the Bills to sort out. Washington played a game in between Sean Taylor's death and his funeral. We should be able to play this Sunday.

I love Josh Allen, but don't let him call it.

Makes sense. There's no realistic way to make up a Monday night game in the same week, and then turn around and play the following weekend. Now they need to make a call on how they're handling this game overall, so that teams know where they stand going into the last game of the season.

So every team except the Bills and Bengals get an extra bye week. No thanks.

"The integrity of the season" went out the window the second they postponed the game. There is no actual way to set things right without disadvantaging somebody. Postponing the game was the right decision, but now we're in a position of having to figure out how to choose among a variety of alternatives each of which is unfair to somebody. I'm always reluctant to make predictions about what the NFL will or won't do, but I'm very skeptical that the league will rearrange the entire rest of the season when they could just call it a forfeit or tie or whatever and be done with it.

So what if they do? Every team in the league theoretically has that option right now.

I don't think the Bills organization will object to this decision. Everything I've seen from the Pegulas, Beane, and McDermott tells me that they are mature adults who will bite the bullet on this because it's in the best interests of the league collectively. Obviously I'd also be fine with giving both teams wins or going on winning percentages too. I'm just pushing back on the argument that this game "has" to be made up. It doesn't, and that's not even a good option.

Too late. That ship sailed as soon as they decided to postpone the game last night. There is literally no solution at this point that doesn't create a competitive advantage for somebody. Right now, the league should be thinking about how to minimize the damage. There is a very high likelihood that they'll determine that the least-bad outcome is to give the Bills a forfeit. That will suck as a fan, but it will just be Bills fans who are put out by that decision and most of us will be okay with it. Fans of CIN, KC, BAL, NE, MIA, and JAX are all fine with that approach. It's a better all-around solution than trying to squeeze in a makeup game in the middle of the week, or rescheduling the playoffs, or stuff like that.

This completely screws up the logistics of 16 games. We don't even know if stadiums are available the following week.

This is an underrated point. The league needs to make a decision promptly. Like today.

I think there's like a 99.9% probability that this week's games go off as scheduled. They probably aren't even under discussion. Why would they be? Lots and lots of NFL games have been played in the wake of one tragedy or another. This year's week 18 will join that list, unfortunately.

I'm just talking about not playing last night's game. I don't care what term the league uses for it.

I'd stop it with this. Anybody who cares to do so could track down scores of plays in which Bills RBs/WRs/TEs made the exact same play. Higgins did nothing wrong.