Buffalo Bills player collapses on field

This.

Most likely commotio cordis.

Less likely: trauma to the heart. A coworker once had a horse kick in the chest and had a ruptured tricuspid valve.

I really wonder what the implications of this are for the rest of the teams and how it will impact the rest of the season. If (god forbid) Hamlin doesn't make it, I have a really hard time thinking all 32 teams will suit up and play this Saturday/Sunday. It seems like the whole league is basically at a stand still until we get some concrete information about his health (which might takes days or weeks to fully develop).

You seem confused.

You can watch that play at any speed you want and, if you have watched a lot of NFL football, you will realize that it was not a "massive blow" as claimed.

No one claimed "there's no possible way it could be from the collision," so your strawman attempt there is not worth much. What was pointed out to you is that there have been hundreds of thousands of such hits in the NFL over the years, and no one has gone into ventricular fibrillation as a result. That is a massive amount of data that is inconsistent with your uniformed claim regarding cause.

Your conclusion that the ventricular fibrillation must have come from the collision even rules out all the common causes of such a rare occurrence in young people -- genetic anomaly, disease caused by drug abuse, prior injury. You guys see something on video once and conclude that's all the evidence you will ever need. That's how children think.

Awesome site you're running here, fam. Really full of the best, brightest, good-faith people.

So let’s think here …

How many times have all players in the NFL taken hits in the chest since 1963 ... a million or more ... how many..?!

Out of that large number of players and the countless number of chest collisions, how many in the last 60 years have had their hearts stop beating or in need of CPR in the middle of a competition/game or in practice...? What, 1 -3 maybe out of the possibly of millions of impacts to the chest of 1,000s of NFL pro-athletes who have played actual games or have tried out for any NFL teams ..?

Are you/we unable to fathom that this Buffalo player could maybe possibly be a victim of the Fauci sauce..?!

I think it’s a reasonable question and a question that should be addressed…

I see you paid attention to Wejo's comment to keep it civl with regard to this, Jesus. There is no evidence to suggest that vaccination status had anything to do here. I love when people with no medical training make comments about things they know nothing about. The likeliest explanation for what happened is commotio cardis, but that is only one possible explanation and we will not know any more until more information is released, if it is. The fact that thousands of players have not suffered a similar injury is meaningless- this is stupid astatistical thinking similar to figuring if you play black 3x in a row in roulette and it comes up red each time it is likely to come up black the next time. Lots of hockey players get hit in the chest with the puck, too; only a very few cases occur. Commotio cardis requires the injury to occur within a time frame of around less than 40ms. That is a might small window, and the injury has to occur over a specific region of the heart. And layers are tremendously fit and can absorb a lot of impact shock.

You know was just a ticking time bomb waiting to happen. And people (the NFL, the media) will and are conveniently trying to frame this up as just a "freak occurrence cardiac event" - which yes it is, but when you watch the play closely the entire act involves two key things. Firstly Higgins as he approaches contact, lowers his shoulder and starts moving his body upwards which then makes contact first on the chest but continues upwards with his helmet which connects with facemask of Hamlin (if you don't believe me go force yourself to watch the hit slow-motion) and secondly a bizarre tackling technique not focussed on the wait/lower body but as seems to be the case in 90% of "tackling" now - always on the upper body.

The bottom line is this - if neither Higgins nor Hamlin are wearing a helmet this interaction doesn't happen. Higgins doesn't think he's invincible and can pop up into a tackle towards a players head and Hamlin doesn't go anywhere near Higgins upper body.

If it's not clear by now, the sport of American Football is so flawed and dangerous it defies belief. Helmets have given players irrational confidence and the concept of what they protect is so wildly incorrect. Helmets protect you from cuts and scratches and should be there for incidental head contact (like soft helmets/headgear are in rugby). They aren't part of a players arsenal when it comes to "lighting up" guys on offense or defense. The crack of plastic on plastic which now defines a "hit" is so unbelievably moronic and archaic. Honestly it is a miracle we don't see incidents like this and the Tagavailoa debacles almost every week. For gods sakes we saw a kid at the end of the TCU v UM game almost try and maim another kid and the underlying theme was that "football is just a violent game and UM shouldn't blame the loss on not getting an officials call".

Which ultimately is what f--ks me off the most about this situation. This sh-t happens every game, every week in the NFL and college and only now does the "this isn't a football player it's a human being" narrative come to the forefront. Players don't give a f--k until something like this happens and neither does the league. In the pros you can missile yourself into a defenseless player and the repercussions are what - a goddamn yellow flag and 15 yards? The majority of "fans" want to live in the 70s with their memories of Terry Bradshaw getting whacked on the skull every second play and pander this "well this ain't flag football and that's what they get paid for" cr@p - of course when it's not your son, brother, husband, buddy out there it's easy right?

The sport of football needs to change. This incident will get misdirected towards a "just horrible coincidence" narrative as it is already but this is all connected, don't be fooled. Otherwise this will just be the tip of the iceberg. My guess is that next year we are going to see some seismic shifts with respect to player safety in the league and it's about damn time.

Maybe all the snow played a role here?

What evidence do you have to support that? Thousands of players have been hit in the chest and yet this is the first time it's happened on an NFL field. But, it appears certain speculation is more allowable than others.

No, it isn't meaningless. That fact shows the high unlikelihood of ventricular fibrillation in a young athlete on a football filed being caused by a collision on the field.

Terrible analogy. You could and should have come up with a better one.

It is your thinking on this that is stupid and "astatistical," like figuring the cause of a commercial plane crash caught on 5 seconds of video must have been the wheels contacting the runway, when that happens uneventfully several millions times a year.

Yes, precisely.

There are an average of 154 plays in an NFL game.

There are 272 games in an NFL Season.

There are 11 players on each side.

If each player got hit on every play of every game of the season, that would be ~460,000 hits.

Take that over the 57 seasons in the Super Bowl Era that would be 26.2 million hits.

Let's say that 50% of those were "hard" hits. That is 13.1 million.

There have now been 2 NFL players to have suffered a heart attack/cardiac arrest during an NFL game.

1/6.6 million chance for this to happen, getting hit in the right exact spot, at the right exact force with the right exact timing to stop a heart seems kinda right to me.

Prayers for Damar. This is a random accident and a tragedy. Nothing more.

Maybe you should try setting up and running your own message board, Karen

Callous? Nancy Grace speculates on crimes committed all the time, without even half the information, and character assassinating the suspect (always male, but never black) all the time. The main stream media never waits to speculate, yet you don't call them callous.

There’s actually nothing clearly about it, but nice try. that’s why Musk bought Twitter, so we can get back to debate and back to finding truth. if this guy took a boaster recently and dropped, it wouldn’t be the first time

you guys are hilarious. How many players have received the Fauci sauce? If they are taking hits to the chest every game as you say, wouldn't this have been happening over and over the last couple of seasons? Complete lack of critical thinking.

Keep it civil? You mean do not make that one speculation that you don't agree with

But if it were due to a hit that has happened millions of times before, that is less likely than being due to newly introduced variables.

A number of the posters on here supporting the idea of commotio cordis are doctors, and I will defer to their knowledge. I am not a doctor. However, I was aware of commotio cordis from reading and some of the CPR and ACLS classes I have taken with my wife (who is a DDS). A number of years ago I read a Lee Child book called Worth Dying For. In it, Jack Reacher punches an Iranian gangster in the chest and stops his heart. It's amazing what one can glean from reading books. My kids astound me each and every day with random facts they have learned through the years from all of the fiction books they have read. You should try reading a book some time.