Sad News: Bills Key Man has a brutal accident just now and might not make it………

Millions of football fans held their breath for close to 20 long minutes Monday night when Buffalo Bills’ Damar Hamlin had a cardiac arrest after making a routine tackle.

While the players formed a prayer circle to shield him from view, the 24-year-old safety was resuscitated and taken to a hospital, where he remains in critical condition. Thousands of fans expressed their horror on social media, while more than 100 others held a solemn vigil outside the hospital.

Except for a few cretins who used the tragedy to push misinformation about Covid vaccines, there was uniform concern for the young athlete. “Often times people forget what players risk on Sundays,” tweeted Scott Quessenberry, an offensive lineman for the Houston Texas.

It’s a key point. The injury to Hamlin is not unique to football — in fact, experts told NBC News it’s likely a rare cardiac phenomenon most common in young hockey or baseball players. But the context is key here. Yet again, a player’s family and friends are left hoping for the best. Because week after week, game after game, it has become inescapably clear that the NFL is a brutal, violent league that, even in the best of circumstances, inflicts life-altering damage on its players. While Monday’s incident was likely an outlier, injuries of all kinds have become incredibly predictable. We have known this for years, even if we prefer to ignore the truth.

As this week highlighted, football’s damage takes many forms. But players’ brains get some of the worst of it. In the largest study conducted on the subject, 99% of former NFL players showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a devastating neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated head trauma.

With the caveat that all the samples came from players who were symptomatic (and who agreed for their brains to be donated to the study), the evidence clearly shows that a lifetime of routine football plays, not just the bone-breaking, tendon-tearing injuries, can cause memory loss, alarming mood swings and severe depression. In some cases, it can be a precursor to suicide, as it did for Hall of Famer Junior Seau, who killed himself in 2012 and requested that his brain be posthumously probed for signs of CTE.