I find the reaction to the suspicion generated by Hamlin (or whomever) at the game to be the most interesting part of this.
I think most sensible people look at the following and simply think it’s strange: no video of him, no comments from him since he was hurt; shows up to the game with his face covered and wearing sunglasses; jumping around, hooting and hollering, still with face covered, in the box like three weeks after barely surviving a heart attack and intubation; no oxygen to be found as the tv reporter quotes his dr that he still requires oxygen; Josh Allen’s ambiguous comments when asked if he was duped by a “fake Hamlin in the locker room”; the fact that he appeared healthy in his appearance at the game but no tv interview, no comments attributed to him.
I suppose there are reasonable explanations for this. He could be temporarily disfigured and/or unable to talk well due to treatment (maybe face swollen from steroids or something). But the whole thing is definitely odd. I personally just assumed that he had appeared somewhere and made comments and thought the whole controversy was dumb. When I found out basically that nobody had documented seeing the guy since he went in the hospital, I was surprised. I think any reasonable person would be.
And so I think this starts with people just asking reasonable questions. The NFL obviously has a financial interest in avoiding controversy over on field injuries, particularly as they’re trying to play the playoffs and SB. And the NFL has certainly demonstrated it will go to ABSURD lengths if they think there is money to lose. For instance, just three weeks ago the league was trying to get these guys to resume a game within a half hour after they thought they just watched their teammate get killed on the field.
So the suspicion seems perfectly rational to me. But what is interesting is how quickly people dismiss the suspicions as “conspiracy theories.” The suspicious ones are dismissed as crazy and stupid by the people just blindly accepting a narrative from a corporation that has objectively demonstrated its willing to go to absurd lengths (doctoring and hiding medical data on concussions; routinely shooting up its players with poisonous painkillers; etc…). And this is after we’ve watched narrative after narrative collapse and the supposed tin foil hat crowd been proven right, at least right to question the official version of events.
So I think this will be really interesting if more time passes without some kind of explanatory appearance by Hamlin. By this weekend’s games it will be THE NO 1 STORY in the country, not just sports story, if nobody hears from or more significantly sees this guy.
My personal take is that he is probably alive but in really bad shape, as you would expect of a guy who suffered a heart attack that should have killed him and reportedly required him to be revived twice before being placed in a coma and on resuscitation. And I think the narrative that he was fine just got away from the league and it got out that he was going to the game and they tried to fake it. And now they are in quite a fix if he is not as healthy as represented.
