BillsFanSD

We're not going to get this petty, are we?

I don't actually harbor any particular ill-will against the Chiefs, but this team has been maddening to watch this year. I can't do it.

If KC loses and we win, we get the #1 seed. I think it's basically as if we lost half a game on Monday night.

But this is the NFL we're talking about. They would turn this into a 3-hour primetime event with a halftime show featuring Sheryl Crow and Darius Rucker.

I think you're definitely right that most of the league would have preferred for the game to continue, and up until a few days ago that was the expectation. But I think we need to acknowledge that social expectations have changed, and a large and very vocal segment of the population is not okay with players continuing a football game after a player is seriously injured. It doesn't really matter whether we as individual support that change or not -- we just need to recognize that this change has occurred and move forward as best we're able. This one particular game was literally unprecedented. Not because of what happened to Damar Hamlin, but because for the first time one team chose not to return to the field. So the league was left scrambling and this is what they came up with. It's not a great solution, but it's not terrible. I hope the league revisits this issue in the offseason when people are ready to think this through rationally and unemotionally. Going forward, the standard should be that teams who opt not to continue play should just take the forfeit and move on. That respects their agency as adults and lets them live with the consequences of their own decisions, which is something that adults should welcome. It is inconceivable to me that McDermott, Beane, the Pegulas, or anybody else would have had any serious objection to taking a forfeit on Monday night if that had been the option. Nobody could possibly criticize the Bills for making that choice, so no hard feelings. I imagine that the first objection to this suggestion will be that it's unfair that the team who loses a player also loses the game. But that's how it works now in literally every other context. When we lost Von Miller, that wasn't fair, but the harm fell entirely on the Bills. Nobody else, just us. If you're not willing to let the harm from an injury lie with the team of the injured player, you put yourself in the position of having to figure out how to apportion that harm across 31 other teams, which is a fool's errand as we learned this week.

This part doesn't bother me at all, given that the league decided to call it a no-contest. If we win this weekend, we'll finish the season with a better record than the Bengals. Not because of the game that got cancelled, but because of the 16 other games. We earned that legitimately, under the rules as written.

It's fine. There are probably like a dozen different solutions that I would have been okay with. This isn't the one I would have picked, but I'm more or less satisfied with it so I voted accordingly. My preferred outcomes in a vacuum were: 1. Coin flip. 2. Winning percent with no other adjustments. 3. Bills forfeit. 4. Any other solution not involving replaying the game or changing the playoff field. . [Acceptable outcomes end here] . 5. Any solution involving an 8th playoff team. . . . 6. Resuming the game. This falls under #4 and it's okay by me.

Sure. And the Bills were two-score favorites over the Jets back in November. Things happen. If Chiefs fans were showing up telling us that this is all our fault because we'd have the #1 seed locked up if we had just taken care of business against the Jets, we'd tell them to get bent. So let's not do that to the Bengals.

Well, yeah. We've spent the last several days talking about the importance of HFA. Why we should we be surprised that other teams also think that HFA is important?

To be 100% clear, I'm not a doctor. I'm just going on what I've been by doctors elsewhere. The way it was explained to me is that commotio cordis is a freak injury that has no realistic chance or reoccurrence. Or more technically, Hamlin's chance of suffering such an injury in the future would be no worse than any other player's However, none of those doctors are even remotely convinced that this was commotio cordis. Apparently it's impossible for anyone to have reached such a diagnosis at this point. An undiagnosed heart ailment is possible. A respiratory infection is possible (I don't get it either). We don't know right now.

That doesn't even make any sense when applied to Allen. Josh Allen isn't a hard worker? The same Josh Allen who came into the NFL as one of the rawest projects the league had seen since Jamarcus Russell? That Josh Allen?

The Chiefs would have gotten the #1 seed legitimately if the Bengals had beaten the Bills and the Chiefs went on to beat the Raiders. There was no scenario in which the Bengals would control their own destiny for the #1 seed heading into week 18. They're being treated reasonably under the circumstances IMO. I'm not really interested in whatever they're complaining about, but they haven't been given anything that they didn't have a good shot at anyway.

I know nobody likes having this pointed out, but it was our players who voluntarily chose not to continue the game on Monday night. If the #1 seed was really that important, they could have played on. They didn't, and that's a perfectly defensible choice. I imagine most of the players would have accepted a forfeit if that option had been presented to them on Monday night. We should be happy with any outcome superior to that, and this outcome is definitely friendlier to the Bills than a forfeit.

Can't blame them. This is a ludicrous outcome. If you're going to flip a coin, then do that to determine the outcome of the CIN/BUF game and be done with it. The proposed solution is worse because it involves a coin flip plus a bunch of other stuff including a gratuitous screw-job for the Bengals.

From what I've been told to expect, this outcome is on the very upper end of what was possible. It's probably fair to start thinking more about what this injury means for Hamlin career-wise. Obviously that wasn't the main focus yesterday. If this was really commotio cordis, my understanding is that there's excellent chance that he returns to football. Things change if there's an underlying heart issue that nobody knew about. That will all get sorted out of course.

Good point. Very few teams have ever rallied to recover from a 7-3 first quarter deficit. We totally got bailed out.

We're getting way ahead of ourselves here, but the Bills will probably be favored in any AFCCG against any opponent. Bad weather is a field-leveler that always benefits the underdog. I don't think we should mind playing on a neutral field, especially if it's a dome or a warm-weather location. There's a very real likelihood that that will be better for us than playing in Orchard Park.

Power ratings are just listicles for people to respond to each week. They don't mean anything.

I've noticed this too and I was wondering the same thing. Not judging him or anything, but it feels like he kind of vanished. I'm sure that's probably not actually the case. Edit: Whoops, I should have kept reading. Thanks to everybody who answered this.

I can live with this, but it's dumb that we're doing neutral fields and deciding divisional titles by coin flips when we could have just used a coin flip to determine the outcome of this one game and then proceeded normally. There's no need to go all Rube Goldberg when a more parsimonious solution was available, but whatever. In the offseason, when everyone is calm, collected, and rational, it would be a very good idea to reconsider our protocols for handling severe injuries, playing games under plausibly-traumatic circumstances (including off-field events like the Sean Taylor situation), and how to deal with games that can't be played. We can do far better than this.

I doubt it. This would not have been that big a deal if the league had had a procedure in place and followed it. It's their own fault that they didn't anticipate this situation in advance. I imagine that will get rectified in the offseason.

I've always wanted to see a three-way NFL game. Here's our chance.

None of that stuff matters though. If a player suffered a Kevin Everett-type injury this weekend, there is basically zero chance that the game would continue, based on the precedent set by this game. For better or for worse, this game changed things, and the league should recognize that and start planning accordingly. This is a good thing for some group to work on during the offseason. For example, if there's a clear plan for how to handle cancelled games so that everybody knows how this works up front, it wouldn't be that big a deal to shut down a game if a player suffers a serious injury that involves paralysis or worse. They just need guidelines so we're not making it up as we go along like we did this week.

I'm not asking for any special favors, and I don't want any. But the Bills lost out on a home game because of a massive snow storm, had another game severely disrupted by another storm, and very nearly had a player die on the field in another game. Nobody is going to attach any asterisks to a hypothetical championship. This team will have overcome plenty if they reach that goal.

I'm not the first person to notice this, but the math doesn't work for that. You'd have 5 teams in the divisional round.