Last night, during the Monday Night Football game, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed with 5:58 remaining in the first quarter. The game with the Cincinnati Bengals was suspended.
This morning, the Bills said Hamlin had cardiac arrest on the field and is hospitalized in critical condition.
Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest following a hit in our game versus the Bengals. His heartbeat was restored on the field and he was transferred to the UC Medical Center for further testing and treatment. He is currently sedated and listed in critical condition.
— Buffalo Bills (@BuffaloBills) January 3, 2023
Tuesday, former Auburn University football coach Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Auburn) reacted to the situation during an appearance on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program.”
“We’re praying for him and hopefully he fights through this,” Tuberville said. “When you’re watching this in a very important professional football game, millions of people watching, then you got everybody looking at this one person on the field. It just really opens your eyes to how brutal this sport is to be honest with you.”
The former coach said he’s seen a lot of bad injuries during his career, but none similar to what happened on the field Monday night.
“I’ve been around devastating injuries before, but this obviously was life threatening,” he said. “I’ve been around broken ankles, Carnell Williams snapped his ankle right in front of me when we were playing in Florida one year.
“But I’ve never been through one quite like this where a player goes down because of cardiac arrest.”
Tuberville said things have to happen at just the right time for something like that happens to a player.
“It’s unfortunate that the player was high and the running back just runs over him with his helmet and hits him right in the chest and his heart quits beating,” he said. “It’s just very unfortunate. All the stars had to be lined up to make something like this happen.”
The senator also sided with the NFL’s decision to suspend the game.
“[W]hen you’ve got somebody’s life on the line,” he said, “you’ve got all those players on both sides that are affected with this, and everybody watching the game, it shows you that, hey, that’s just a game they’re playing, and what this young man’s fighting for is for his life. You can play this game anytime.
“They can play it the week after the season’s over with, play it three or four days after another game, but I think that definitely it was the right thing to do.”
Tuberville said he doesn’t have the answer on how to prevent an injury like that from happening again.
“It’s a contact sport, and you’re going to have unfortunately things like this happen,” he said. “Again, you’re going to have devastating knee, arm, shoulder, you’re going to have concussions, things like that, but very seldom do you have anything happen to your heart, where you have the collision.
“Unfortunately, it’s a contact sport, it’s very tough, and it’s just the blunt force to the heart, where the heart stops beating, you don’t know whether he had heart problems to begin with, but that makes no difference, it happened, and obviously they’ll look at things to try and correct something like that, but I don’t know what you do to prevent something like that from happening again. It just happened in an inopportune time.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
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