After Bills safety Damar Hamlin was taken off the field in an ambulance during Monday night’s game, the NFL’s broadcast partners on ESPN, ESPN Deportes and Westwood One radio all said that the players would be given five minutes and then the game would resume. It is still not clear where they received that information.
Adding to the unclarity today was NFL Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith, who said he heard nothing about it while the players’ union was communicating with the league on Monday night. Smith said today that he knows nothing about where a five-minute warmup and then the resumption of the game would have come from.
When first asked about ESPN reporting on the five-minute warmup, Smith answered, “I don’t watch ESPN.”
NFL executive V.P. of football operations Troy Vincent has been adamant that the league would not be so insensitive as to expect the Bills to return to play just minutes after seeing one of their teammates having to be revived on the field. Vincent says he doesn’t know who told the broadcasters about the five-minute warmup period, but says it wasn’t considered at the highest levels of the league office.
Whoever put that word out got it wrong, and the league got it right by suspending the game.
