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A drama rocked the NFL on Monday night.
Emmanuel GisiHead of the sports report team
It was done. Monday evening, prime time, live on free-to-air US television on sports channel ESPN, two of the young stars are due to duel. Josh Allen (26) and Joe Burrow (26), two new-generation quarterbacks, meet for the first time. They are intended to show the sports world which exquisite talents will make headlines in the NFL in the years to come. A sporting spectacle and a guarantee of TV ratings.
But the game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Buffalo Bills has not found a winner to this day. And there won’t be any more.
The accident happened in the first quarter: Buffalo defender Damar Hamlin (24) tried to tackle his opponent Tee Higgins (23). Higgins, at full speed, shoulders Hamlin in the chest before falling to the ground. A duel like there are dozens of times in the NFL every weekend. But this time something terrible happens: Hamlin stands up briefly, then sinks back to the ground. cardiac arrest. He had to be revived on the field and spent days fighting for his life in the hospital. The game is canceled. Late Thursday evening it will be announced that it will no longer be continued.
The league is booming – but what’s the price?
“Scary,” Burrow would later call the situation with Hamlin. “It was immediately clear that it was not a normal football injury.” The question that neither Burrow nor his colleagues can answer: what happens to the NFL now?
You have to know that the National Football League is booming. According to Forbes, the glamor league made $18 billion last season. For comparison: The Premier League, the financially strongest European sports league, comes to around 6 billion. Outside the US, football is growing rapidly, this season having hosted seasonal games in Mexico, the UK and Germany with overwhelming success. At the Germany premiere in Munich, the league could have filled the Allianz Arena 45 times, and the NFL received over 3 million ticket requests. In short: it works. Actually, the corks should pop in the office of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
Football doesn’t just look brutal – football is brutal
And yet the NFL bosses have no reason to toast at the moment. The picture that the league has given in recent weeks is too wild. A series of nasty injuries confirmed what the brothers Steve and Mark Fainaru described in their book “League of Denial” back in 2013: Football is a spectacle that sometimes doesn’t just look brutal. Football is brutal sometimes.
Even more brutal is how the league deals with this fact: it ignores it as best it can. Even as it is now crystal clear to medical experts, the constant on-field collisions put football players at increased risk of developing CTE, a degenerative brain disease that can lead to violent outbursts, depression, addiction, or even suicide later in life can. The example the Fainaru brothers use as a comparison in their book: The tobacco industry, which for decades denied that smoking is harmful.
“No sane doctor will give him clearance this season”
The most blatant example is that of Miami player Tua Tagovailoa (24). He, too, a quarterback talent, once highly praised, later stagnant, finally this season under new coach Mike McDaniel on the level that one had hoped for him. But after the third concussion within a few months, he is now threatened with the end of the season. Expert Chris Nowinski of the Concussion Legacy Foundation writes on Twitter: “No doctor in his right mind will give him clearance for a game this season.” A league flattens its stars.
The paradox: in the past, Tagovailoa would have simply played again at the weekend. Today, the NFL has so-called concussion spotters in the stadiums, independent medical professionals who observe the game and have players who are suspected of having a brain injury removed from the game and examined. They had overlooked the Tagovailoa injury. It was Miami trainer McDaniel who noticed in the video study afterwards that something was wrong with his passer and sent him to the doctor.
A TV man gets to the heart of the feeling
Tagovailoa’s example shows how things are in the NFL: The players are now aware of the problems. But many of them feel alone. Garrett Bush, a sports talker on local TV in Cleveland, summed up the feeling that many professionals and observers currently have in a tirade last week: “The NFL doesn’t give a damn about its players.”
Many contracts can be terminated from one week to the next, the pension scheme and insurance benefits are a mockery compared to the league’s billions in profits. “You want applause for the fact that there were doctors and a defibrillator in the stadium when Damar Hamlin was injured?” Bush told the league leaders. «That was the minimum, the absolute minimum! It’s time you did the right thing. These men sacrifice their health for you! And you pay them hardly any pensions, hardly any insurance money. Because it would cost you something. It’s all about the money!”
There has been good news from Damar Hamlin since Friday. Lucky. It could still be a hot winter in the NFL.