The New Orleans Saints have a football game to play in Week 18, but the only real topic in the locker room to start the week was with someone fighting for his life off the field.
That player is Damar Hamlin, who collapsed on the field as the Bills faced the Bengals during Monday Night Football and had to receive CPR on the field before being rushed to the hospital. It left players around the league unsurprisingly rattled, and that could be sensed and understood as the Saints began their practice week on Wednesday.
“When you see something like this, it just reminds you how fragile life is," head coach Dennis Allen said, "and it reminds you that everybody that’s involved in this is — although there’s a lot that goes into this game — we’re all humans here, and I think that’s where our thoughts should be.”
Reports on Hamlin's status and progress have been positive, though he remains in critical condition as of Wednesday morning. Allen is no longer a player, but he more than understands the position that his players are in. In 1991, during his playing career at Texas A&M, his teammate James Glenn collapsed on the field as he was warming up for a game and passed away.
“I’ve seen it first-hand and how that affects people, individuals, teams," he said. "It’s tough to deal with.”
Two decades later, he was seeing his own team trying to cope with a tragedy befalling one of their own NFL brethren. Allen said the staff allowed players to process the situation on their own Tuesday, but the Wednesday team meeting was opened by psychologist Dr. Lana Chambliss, in part to lay out the tools that were available to players should they need to use them.
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One player Allen said he did speak with on Tuesday was practice squad TE Lucas Krull, who spent 2020 as a teammate of Hamlin's with the Pitt Panthers. Krull, who was watching the game, said many of his former college teammates participate in a group chat that has been flooded with messages over the past 48 hours. Krull recalled Hamlin as one of the players who helped show him the ropes as the TE arrived as a transfer from Florida during the 2020 season.
“We play this game and bones will break, you’ll get tears, something will happen," Krull said, emotions clearly showing on his face as he spoke. "But now you’re talking life and death, and that takes the game out of everything and now we’re just talking about our brother, our friend, peoples’ family members, and that’s what makes it so hard.”
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In all it was a clear feeling of helplessness among players as they try to focus on preparing for a Week 18 matchup with the Panthers that will have no impact on the playoff picture. Allen pointed to the field as a safe haven of sorts during times like this, where players can focus on the game and try to let other concerns fade away for at least a few moments.
One small way players and others around the nation have found to make an impact is by donating to the annual toy drive that Hamlin runs. It began with a stated goal of $2,500. In the minutes following the injury, the drive began receiving donations as a show of support. One of the earliest donations came from Andy Dalton and his wife, JJ, who donated $3,000. As of Wednesday morning the drive had received well over $7 million in donations from more than 200,000 donors.
For Dalton, the tragic moment hit close to home. He spent the majority of his NFL career playing on the same Bengals turf that Hamlin was injured on, and he witnessed first-hand the terrifying injury that struck Ryan Shazier in the 2017 season that ended the Steelers linebacker's playing career. Dalton also remembers how Bills fans donated more than $400,000 to his foundation as a "thank you" for helping the Bills make the playoffs later that season when the Bengals beat the Ravens.
"The outpouring of support that not only he has received from people in the NFL, his family has received is from really the entire country, it shows that this is so much bigger than a game of football and the impact that football can have on so many different communities, so many different lives," Dalton said. "So that’s just a small thing that we can do."
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