An hour after Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field and about 35 minutes after he was rushed to a Cincinnati hospital, a small knot of people gathered amid a chaotic scene outside the locker rooms beneath Paycor Stadium.
Bills coach Sean McDermott, Bengals coach Zac Taylor, referee Shawn Smith and a few team executives and staffers stood anxiously in a semicircle with NFL chief football administrator Dawn Aponte. Passing Aponte’s cellphone back and forth, they spoke with NFL executives at the league’s command center in Manhattan.
It was 9:55 p.m. ET and the stadium’s scoreboard read: “THE GAME IS TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED. PLEASE STAND BY FOR FURTHER INFORMATION.” League officials still had not decided the game’s fate. But for both teams’ coaches and players, there was never a doubt: They would not play another down that Monday night.
“The Lord himself could come down, and we were not going to play again,” a high-ranking official from one of the teams told ESPN on the condition of his and the team’s anonymity. “She [Aponte] was getting pressure. She was not getting consistent and direct messaging that she deserved to receive.”
Aponte appeared caught between two teams that didn’t want to play and league officials inside the command center, led by NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent, who left open that possibility for nearly an hour, the official said. “Whatever crazy nonsense she was getting,” the official added, “man, she held it. She held it strong.”
While NFL officials insisted that they never intended to restart the Bills-Bengals game, the accounts of coaches, players, union officials and team executives tell another story: Postponing the game was a ground-up decision.
“The league did not cancel the game,” the team official said. “The Bills and the Bengals canceled the game.”
NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said Monday that the league would have no further comment. Last week, McCarthy answered some questions about why ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” broadcast initially reported that the teams would resume play after a five-minute warmup. He said at the time Vincent and other league officials would not comment.
According to Rule 17-1-4 of the NFL rulebook, the decision to postpone a game because of extraordinary circumstances lies with commissioner Roger Goodell.
The next day, in a memo to all 32 teams, the commissioner indicated he had made the call: “After speaking with both teams and NFLPA leadership, I decided to postpone last night’s game and have our focus remain on Damar and his family.”
On Sunday, Goodell addressed the question for the first time, telling Boston’s The Sports Hub the decision to postpone the game that night came “with a lot of discussion.”
“A standard practice would be to resume play, but when you get feedback that it may not be appropriate, that’s when Troy made the decision to suspend play,” Goodell said. “Which was the right decision, and allow everyone to go back and let’s gather ourselves and get more information, which was clear we needed to do. So, and then I made the decision to postpone shortly thereafter.”
That final decision might have belonged to Goodell, but the first instinct not to play came on the field in Cincinnati.
“The ambulance left the field … and it was crystal clear from everyone’s perspective that we could not play,” the top team official said. Aponte was speaking nonstop to NFL executives in New York and coaches and officials at the game. “The only chaos was coming … from the command center.”
The NFL’s senior-most executive inside the command center was Vincent, who oversaw staff on the field and others in communication with broadcast partners. In a conference call hours after the game was suspended, Vincent adamantly denied reports on ESPN’s broadcast that the game would resume after a five-minute…
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