Damar Hamlin’s tragic episode was shocking because it was an outlier.
Damar Hamlin’s tragic episode was shocking because it was an outlier.
I n 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt called a number of American leaders to the White House to discuss a matter of national importance: Football had become too deadly.
According to one newspaper account, 45 football players died between 1900 and 1905, primarily from internal injuries, broken necks, concussions, or broken backs.
“Picked up unconscious from beneath a mass of other players, it was generally found that the victim had been kicked in the head or stomach, so as to cause internal injuries or concussion of the brain, which, sooner or later, ended life,” reported the Washington Post in October 1905.
And this, of course, didn’t even count the thousands more who were grievously injured with skull fractures, snapped spines, and crippling leg injuries.
As a result, Roosevelt called Walter Camp of Yale, William T. Reid Jr. of Harvard, Arthur T. Hillebrand of Princeton, and others to help craft new rules outlawing the brutality inherent in the game.
Despite Roosevelt’s efforts, football — then played only with leather helmets and minimal padding — continued to be a deadly game throughout the remainder of the 20th century. In the first six weeks of the 1961 season, 18 young men between high school and the pros were killed by injuries to the head and neck area. One study published in 2013 found 243 college and high-school deaths related to football between 1990 and 2010, although nearly two-thirds of the fatalities were due to indirect causes such as heat exhaustion.
Of course, comparing the brutal days of football when deaths were common is cold comfort to a nation of fans convulsing in unison after seeing Buffalo Bills second-year safety Damar Hamlin fall to the ground Monday night after tackling Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins.
Following the tackle, Hamlin stood upright but then suffered cardiac arrest, dropping to the ground before being resuscitated. The emotional Bills and Bengals players soon exited the field, and the game, only five minutes having elapsed, was postponed.
As of Wednesday, Hamlin remained in critical condition in a Cincinnati hospital. The league has said the game, which has significant playoff implications, will not be resumed this week.
Following the tragedy, an outpouring of love and appreciation for Hamlin from fans flooded social media. Americans, as they are wont to do, sent Hamlin’s charity, which buys toys for children affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, over $6 million in donations.
But the admiration for Hamlin was coupled with condemnation of both football and the NFL. “The NFL Has a Damar Hamlin Problem,” wrote Alex Shephard at the New Republic. “The NFL Isn’t Built for This,” added Alex Kirshner at Slate.
But almost no commentary critical of the NFL offered any concrete solutions as to what the league could have done differently. Most berated the league for assuming the game could be restarted after a few minutes. Some fell back on the league’s failures to protect player health in the past.
Yet one can have compassion for Hamlin and still recognize that by virtually every measure the NFL is the safest it has ever been. Further, it is nearly impossible to guarantee the safety of every player in a league in which increasingly large men are crashing into each other at increasingly high speeds.
One hesitates to give the NFL a sizable amount of credit for increased safety in the league, given the laggard pace at which it handled data linking concussions to chronic traumatic encephalopathy. For years, it was clear that football was unlike other sports: Studies show the damage caused by brain injuries suffered during an NFL career led to shorter lifespans and a reduced quality of life for former players. The league sells violence, and the more dangerous the hits, the more people have tuned in.
(The NFL was even shamed as being too violent by a movie starring Will Smith, so let that sink in.)
But amid years of pointed criticism, the league has changed for the better.
Just a few years ago, the phrase “concussion protocol” was unknown to fans. Now, several notable exceptions aside, the days of a wobbly quarterback running a play right after a knee-buckling hit to the head are mostly over.
Critics might point to an episode earlier this year when Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa suffered two head injuries in the span of a week, the latter leaving him sprawled on the field in obvious distress during a nationally televised game. But l’affaire Tua is the exception that proves the rule: Soon, the Dolphins doctor who examined Tagovailoa was fired.
The rules of the league have also changed. Gone are the vicious helmet-to-helmet hits popularized by former NFL safety Chuck Cecil, who Sports Illustrated once posited was “too vicious for the NFL.” Cecil specialized in planting his perpetually bloody nose directly into the face masks of unsuspecting wide receivers, leaving them supine on the field. A Cecil “highlight reel” now reads as a reality horror movie.
And, of course, quarterbacks, who are often hit with no warning, are protected as never before. Any defensive player who gets close enough to connect to the Bluetooth headset in Tom Brady’s helmet immediately receives a flag for roughing the passer.
Further, knowing that the league will die out if parents think the game is too violent, the NFL is experimenting with new equipment that will make football even safer. Preseason practices and games have seen a new type of helmet adorned with cushioning that gives players an enlarged dome akin to the Great Gazoo’s from the Flintstones.
All these reforms appear to have worked. Between 2015 and 2021, documented concussions in the league dropped from 275 to 187. This drop coincided not only with rule changes designed to protect players, but more players’ using helmets recommended by the league. According to NBC’s Peter King, about half the league in 2015 was using the technologically advanced helmets. Six years later, that number had increased to 99 percent.
And clearly, while football is more dangerous than, say, golf, other sports aren’t immune from dangerous injuries either. As NR’s Charles C. W. Cooke noted, both basketball and soccer have seen players collapse with heart episodes. Any man who has watched Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina get smoked in the jewels by a 102-miles-per-hour fastball knows how dangerous baseball can be.
Ultimately, who are we to stop telling athletes fully aware of the risks their sport poses that they should stop playing? “Part of living this dream is putting your life at risk,” said former Steelers safety Ryan Clark in a moving monologue following Hamlin’s injury. He is right — participants should be free to weigh their own exposure to harm and act accordingly.
So clearly, football has changed for the better. What hasn’t changed for the better is our rush to use every unavoidable tragedy as a platform to declare our moral superiority on social media.
As Hamlin lay on the field, Twitter users rushed to their keyboards to declare the league barbaric and to shame people for watching such a violent sport. Others tried to use the Hamlin tragedy as a platform to push Covid-vaccine misinformation. Across the board, angry people suggested Hamlin’s injury had to be someone else’s fault, and they had specific information as to who should be blamed.
(As a side note, I was not immune to tweeting angrily while in my feelings over the event. When spray-tanned skeleton Skip Bayless was questioning whether the league could possibly cancel the game, I kindly offered him the opportunity to remain silent by using a four-letter expletive.)
Perhaps there is a reform out there that can make football even safer. Teddy Roosevelt backed a plan to legalize the forward pass, which cut down on the number of plays that ended up in a full 22-player pileup.
But for now, we should wish the best for Damar Hamlin while recognizing that the league is the safest it has ever been. It is small solace, but the reason Hamlin’s injury was so shocking is because it happens so infrequently. We should all hope it remains an outlier.