Upon Further Review, Damar Hamlin Should Return To NFL, But With An Asterisk

Regarding whether Damar Hamlin should play again in the NFL, I’ve changed my mind, and so should you.

Let him play.

Let him (along with those of us into compassion) try to forget as much as possible after opening kickoffs that he almost died on the field in Cincinnati earlier this year before a national television audience.

Let him spend the third season of the four-year contract he signed for $3.64 million as a rookie with the Buffalo Bills seek to become an even more promising safety for the franchise.

That is, if he wants to do those things, and he does.

“My heart is still in the game. I love the game. It is something I want to prove to myself, not nobody else,” Hamlin told reporters Tuesday in Orchard Park, New York, where he looked as fit as he sounded.

This was 3 1/2 months after Hamlin shocked the world after he needed paramedics to restore his heartbeat on the field during a Monday Night Football game against the Bengals in Cincinnati. He suffered from what later was diagnosed as commotio cordis following one of his tackles.

No way this guy should play again.

That’s what I thought.

Now, despite those horrible images — ranging from Hamlin lying motionless for what seemed an eternity on the floor of Paycor Stadium to his intubation at a Cincinnati hospital to his days of living through a breathing tube — he wants to play again, and he should, and it’s not about the money.

Soon after the Bills placed Hamlin on injured reserve (IR) in January within days following his near-death experience, they said they would deliver every nickel they promised to the 25-year-old from the Pittsburgh area for the second year of his deal, and get this: Under the standard NFL contract, the Bills only were obligated to pay Hamlin a lower rate as an IR entry.

Instead, the Bills called that audible after they huddled with league officials and the NFL Players Association.

Hamlin just wants to play.

Well, it’s that, and it’s also this, said Hamlin during the rest of his emotional session with reporters at the Bills’ practice facility: “I just wanna show people that that fear is a choice that you can keep going in something without having the answers and without knowing what’s at the end of the tunnel. Or you might feel anxious, you might feel any type of way, but you just keep putting that right foot in front of the left one, and you keep going. I want to stand for that.”

Yeah, I hear you, Damar. A bunch of your NFL predecessors likely had similar thoughts at one time.

For instance: There were the more than 4,500 athletes who sued the NFL earlier this century after they accused the league of hiding the dangers of concussions while rushing injured players back into action.

Those lawsuits led to the NFL settling with a group of former players for $1 billion during the summer of 2022.

Concussions remained a huge NFL topic last season. With Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa as the poster child of it all, the league confirmed in February that the 149 concussions over 271 games during the 2022 regular season represented an 18% jump over the previous year. It also was 14% beyond the three-year average of 130 between 2018 and 2020.

That’s bad.

This isn’t for Hamlin: The reports of doctors.

Those reports sway me to urge Hamlin to keep living his passion in shoulder pads and cleats.

Those reports mostly sound like the ones from Dr. Gordon F. Tomaselli, the Marilyn and Stanley M. Katz Dean of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He told Michael Merschel of American Heart Association News Tuesday that in order for athletes — or anybody else, for that matter — to suffer from commotio cordis, they need “several things to go exactly right or exactly wrong” with a blow over the heart.

Merschel added that such a blow had to occur at the the moment of the heartbeat, and he quoted Tomaselli as saying, “It’s a very narrow time window. Anywhere between 20 and 40 milliseconds.”

Merschel also wrote, “Overwhelmingly, Tomaselli said, commotio cordis occurs in people who have no underlying heart disease.”

Then there was this from Bills general manager Brandon Beane, who told reporters Tuesday in Orchard Park that Hamlin can join his teammates as soon as this week during workouts at their practice facility.

“Damar saw his last specialist on Friday,” Beane said. “Long and short of it, when he left Cincinnati, came here to Buffalo General, he saw a couple of specialists here in Buffalo, and then since then, he’s seen three additional specialists, most recently on Friday. They’re all in agreement. It’s not 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 or anything like that. They’re all in lockstep of what this was and that he is cleared (to) resume full activities just like anyone else who was coming back from an injury or whatever.

“So he’s fully cleared. He’s here, and he is of the mindset, he’s in a great headspace to come back and make his return.”

To translate, what happened to Hamlin was a fluke.

Let him play.

But here’s the asterisk . . .

Let us also pray.