Millions of people watched Damar Hamlin collapse during Monday night’s Bills-Bengals game, but it took more than an hour after gameplay was paused before the NFL officials officially postponed the game and said that it would be rescheduled.
According to Ernest Owens of the Daily Beast, the reason for it to take so long to officially postpone the game was… RACISM!
“One would have thought the game would have immediately been cut short. After such a drastic shift in energy and spirit, surely the game would be called without a doubt,” Owens wrote. “It would take an hour after Hamlin was first administered CPR for the NFL to officially postpone the game after first attempting to suspend it. Yes, after all of the chaos, the league thought it was practical to have the traumatized players continue to play.”
As ESPN commentators noted Monday night, players have been knocked out or injured before during a game, and the game would continue. But a game being postponed after having already begun play was unprecedented, and it seemed there was no existing protocol for such a situation, which required NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to approve. Postponing a game after play has begun, and both teams have scored, is hardly a simple matter — even if it was inevitable that the game would not resume that night.
But, nope… according to Owens, racism has to explain the hour-long delay in officially postponing the game.
“It would be one thing if Monday’s incident was a rare drop of the ball from the NFL,” Owens wrote. “Instead, it’s another reminder of how incompetent this multibillion-dollar institution has been to its players, who are mostly Black.”
The NFL has been under fire for its lax protocol in handling players’ potential concussions, but can you explain what that has to do with race? Does Owens have any proof whatsoever that had a white player collapsed on the field that the situation would have been handled any differently? No, he doesn’t. His primary evidence for race being a factor is that the NFL has mostly black players.
Owens then doubled down on his absurd thesis by bringing up Colin Kaepernick. “And now what had once felt like a debatable point seems to be a fact: The NFL blackballed former player Colin Kaepernick after he decided to take a knee in protest of police injustice.”
Suddenly it all makes sense why Owens defaulted to the “racism” accusation. He explains that in a league of mostly black players, Kaepernick’s failure to be signed was proof that the league doesn’t value diversity. That Kaepernick was a mediocre player was irrelevant. “For a powerful institution to instantly railroad the career of a Black person for practicing their free speech […] showed me how the NFL truly felt about diversity when it wasn’t profitable to it.”
All indications are that the NFL wasn’t prepared for such a situation, and it took time to communicate with all the necessary people before officially postponing the game. There are plenty of things to be critical of the NFL for, but let’s stop pretending racism is the root of them.
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