It took the NFL 66 minutes to officially postpone the Bills–Bengals game on Monday night after Buffalo safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field and went into cardiac arrest.
Hamlin received CPR on the field and was then transported via ambulance to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center 30 minutes after he collapsed. The game had been temporarily suspended seven minutes before that. After the safety left the field, the ESPN broadcast shared that the league would allow the teams a five-minute warm-up before returning to action. Instead, the teams went to the locker room and later concluded that the game should not continue.
During that hour-plus, fans wondered why an announcement wasn’t made quicker. It seemed obvious to some that the game should not be played that night.
The NFL Players Association president J.C. Tretter seemed to question the league’s hesitation to come to that decision while speaking to the media on Thursday.
“In times when a leader needs to make a decision, when you take a bunch of time to ask everybody else what their opinion would be, it seems more like you’re searching for the answer you want and not what the right answer actually is,” Tretter said, via Yahoo Sports. “We made the determination it wouldn’t be smart to continue playing the moment we saw what happened and how scary that was. Obviously, as we all know, it took a long time for that to actually go into effect.”
Regarding the five-minute warm-up period reported by ESPN, NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent recently denied this report.
“It never crossed our mind to talk about warming up to resume play,” Vincent said. “That’s ridiculous. That’s insensitive.”
However, ESPN explained that “there was constant communication in real time between ESPN and league and game officials,” via a statement on Tuesday. The network added that Monday night was an “unprecedented, rapidly-evolving circumstance” and they steered away from any speculation.
The game was officially canceled by the NFL on Thursday night. The playoff implications regarding the game have not been determined.
