Damar Hamlin tragedy strips aw...

The NFL's power holders contribute to the feeling. When a player is hurt, whether for two weeks or an entire season, coaches will flatly say it's "next man up," and for many organizations, the injured player is hidden from the public, not spoken of by the head coach or to by reporters until he's healthy enough to rejoin the machine and contribute. It's a question being grappled with in so many corners of the NFL and beyond on Tuesday, as a young man lies in a Cincinnati hospital room in critical condition, his future uncertain. His future life, we mean, not his future as a football player.

For so long, the NFL's overlords have behaved as if nothing could stop the league, certainly not stop its profits. The oligarchs who have weathered all manner of should-be embarrassing headlines in recent years, from multiple team owner sex scandals to nuclear-waste levels of toxicity in workplace environments to continued abject racism in the form of race-norming and ignoring highly qualified Black coaching candidates. More and more it seems the approach to tamping the resulting outrage isn't to finesse the optics but to shrug, ignore and get to the next game day.

On Monday night, though, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin made a tackle against the Cincinnati Bengals, stood up, and then immediately fell back to the turf in Cincinnati. His heart stopped, and medical personnel administered CPR for several minutes to restart it. Teammates were in tears, their young faces showing their shock at the situation. They all know playing football comes with essentially a 100% injury rate. They never consider death, and there it was on the field with them. As retired NFL defensive back and current ESPN analyst Ryan Clark said Monday night, "At the age of 24, I didn't even know I could die." After a few minutes of Tagovailoa laying on the ground, he was taken off by medical staff and the game resumed, the show going on because the NFL demands that it does.

It is so routine for players that even on Monday night, some of them reflexively began to warm up again after an extended stop following Hamlin's injury. All this while the horror, uncertainty and the feeling about what happened to Hamlin was different than anything any of them had experienced before and hanging thick in the air. They'd all been at practice or at a game before, watched a teammate or opponent suffer a potentially career-ending or life-altering injury, then heard a coach's whistle, moved the huddles a few yards and kept going. It should not be normal. Not in the NFL, not anywhere. There's so much that needs fixing with the league that has needed to be fixed for years, but the prevailing callousness is one place to start.