During Monday night’s Bills/Bengals game, Buffalo’s Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field and was taken to the hospital. He’s now listed in critical condition after suffering cardiac arrest and having his heartbeat restored. The game ended up being postponed.

Of course, when something terrible happens, instead of showing restraint and waiting for the situation to play out, people go right to Twitter and inevitably say something controversial:

He clarified about an hour later:

People can decide if Skip is a dipshit or just worded that tweet poorly, but he got CRUSHED for it by pretty much everybody. Looking at the responses to the original post, I see all sorts of professional athletes, blue check media, and fan rebuttals. We’re at 74,000 quote tweets (and still going) with people calling for FOX to suspend him from Undisputed, which is probably +50000000 at this point. On the next show, he’ll clarify what he meant and then Shannon Sharpe will do a pseudo-chiding and then we’ll segue into something about LeBron James and the Lakers:

But it’s not really a Skip thing. He was just the highest profile guy to get blown up. If you even caught a whiff of the timeline on Monday night, everybody and their mother was tweeting some opinion about postponing or playing the game. The other portion of Twitter immediately turned into cardiologists when, in fact, nobody knew anything about Hamlin’s situation or what was going through the minds of the Bills and Bengals players and their coaches. On top of that, you have all of the COVID people who pronounce the guy dead from the vaccine before he’s even been transported to the hospital. It’s a total joke.


The average joe has very little to offer when a serious situation is unfolding, so I’m not sure why it’s so hard for people to just take a step back. It’s like there’s some mandate that people have to post something, when the upside is what? There’s very little upside. This all stems from the family of “instant access” problems that’s plagued the news business since the advent of social media. In a race to be first, journalists often get shit totally wrong, and generically this issue has spilled over into everybody feeling the urge to get on Twitter and blather when it’s probably just a good idea to log off.

EDIT – I should point out that the one awesome thing that happened last night was this fundraiser getting boosted, perhaps proof that only 95% of Twitter is comprised of dipshits, instead of 100%: