What happened to Damar Hamlin during last night’s Monday Night Football game was horrific. It is also, from everything that we know, impossible to use as a basis from which to draw any broader conclusions. In the entire history of the NFL — as well as in the entire history of college football — no player has ever had a cardiac arrest on the field. That has happened in basketball: In 1990, Hank Gathers died during the semi-finals of the 1990 WCC tournament. It has happened twice in soccer in just the last decade: In 2021, Christian Eriksen collapsed after suffering a cardiac arrest during the European Championships, and, in 2012, during a game in the English Premier League, Fabrice Muamba’s heart stopped for 78 minutes before he was eventually revived. But it has never happened in football. By all accounts, this was a freak occurrence, of the type that happens from time to time in an imperfect world.
In his newsletter today, Jim Geraghty writes that Hamlin’s collapse left “the entire league shaken and wondering how best to keep players safe while maintaining the sport’s popularity.” Football is, indeed, a violent game, and there are, indeed, some lingering problems associated with that violence. Concussions remain an issue, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) remains an issue, and, relative to, say, baseball, football players suffer a high number of dramatic injuries each year. But cardiac arrests are not among those injuries, and they have never been among them — even in the bad old days. Irrespective of whether Damar Hamlin’s collapse was caused by an unknown preexisting heart condition, was the first incidence of commotio cordis ever recorded in football, or was a freak occurrence related to nothing discrete, the NFL will no more be able to prevent the next one than the NCAA was able to save Hank Gathers or FIFA was able to forestall what happened to Christian Eriksen and Fabrice Muamba. Hamlin collapsed after making what, by the NFL’s standards, represented a relatively innocuous tackle.
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