Sean McDermott was making calls to rifle through potential draft picks—always an important piece of the process for the Bills coach, but even moreso during a 2021 evaluation cycle still affected by the pandemic.
Some of those calls wind up being more memorable than others. And as such, there was one name McDermott knew to jot down after going down a checklist of players with Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi.
“He had other players that were coming out that year as well—in particular on defense,” McDermott says. “The player for the Titans, [Rashad] Weaver, he made some big plays Saturday night. And so we were talking about him and talking about another D-lineman that was coming out, and then even potentially another DB. And Pat kept bringing up Damar. And I mean, when a coach does that—and I have so much respect for Coach Narduzzi—he’s doing that for a reason.
“It was just, overall, as a player and a person, the total package, right? Like what you’re looking for when you acquire a player, the total package of player, person, heart, desire, work ethic and character. He just couldn’t stop talking about Damar.”
Damar Hamlin was front of mind from the moment Bills players emerged from the tunnel on Sunday.
Jeffrey T. Barnes/AP
The Bills took Damar Hamlin with the 212th pick that April. Drafting a guy in that range, almost by definition, is taking a flier on someone. They didn’t know he’d evolve into a starter. When you draft a guy at that point, you don’t even know if he’ll make the team. McDermott just knew that, if Narduzzi was right—and he usually was—there was something about Hamlin.
And here McDermott is now, almost two years later, to tell everyone who Hamlin is, the same way Narduzzi did for him back then. He’s done it, of course, over the last week, in the aftermath of the terrifying scene in Cincinnati on Monday night, when Bills assistant athletic trainer Denny Kellington administered CPR to Hamlin on the field. He’s done it as Hamlin’s survival seemed to be in doubt into Tuesday.
Now, he was doing it in a happier circumstance. Yes, the Bills finally got to answer Hamlin’s first question after regaining consciousness—Did we win?—on Sunday, with their fourth straight win, by a 35–23 score, over AFC East rival New England. More importantly, Hamlin got to see the whole thing from his hospital bed at the UC Medical Center in Ohio, clearly healing up faster than anyone expected. Which took McDermott back to Narduzzi.
“He kept talking about Damar,” McDermott says. “You just knew there was something different about this young man.”
The regular season is in the books, and we’ve got plenty to cover in The MMQB. In this week’s column …
• We’re covering the whole spectrum of NFL teams—with looks at the Chiefs, Jaguars and Bears—in Three Deep.
• We’ll dive into the Eagles’ finish, the Bengals’ week, and the Dolphins’ resurgence as part of Ten Takeaways.
• We’ve got what scouts will be looking for in tonight’s national championship in Six from Saturday.
But we’re starting with the story of the week in the NFL, in all of sports, as its latest chapter unfolded on the final Sunday of the season in Orchard Park, N.Y.
The difference in Hamlin as a player and person is a big part of why, for McDermott and his staff, getting the team refocused and ready to play a football game on Sunday was always going to be a challenge. That was true from the time the Bills left the stadium in the midnight hour in Cincinnati, to when they landed back in Buffalo around 2:30 a.m. local time on Tuesday.
From there, as McDermott recounted to me, there were three significant steps that got the Bills back to where they needed to be in time for 1 p.m. on Sunday. The first was Wednesday when Hamlin’s father Mario addressed the players in a team meeting. The second came Thursday, when two UC Medical Center doctors who were working with Hamlin talked to the Bills via videoconference. The third one, the week’s crescendo, was when McDermott surprised the Bills by patching Hamlin himself in via FaceTime, and Hamlin delivered his now famous “Love You, Boys” line.
For McDermott, personally, there was also another moment on Saturday, when the gravity of the situation—and how it hit league-wide—really hit home.
“You watched the games [Saturday] evening, afternoon and the prayer before the game between Tennessee and Jacksonville at midfield,” McDermott says. “That doesn’t happen very often in our league, and I think that was a tremendous sign of unity and support. And that was a big-time game there.”
It was just the prelude to the electric atmosphere that was waiting for the Bills on Sunday. On Sunday afternoon, Buffalo came through the tunnel into that cauldron—with maybe a half-dozen players in the back carrying flags with “3” and “Pray for Damar” printed on them. If you hear the way the 70,753 in the attendance popped, you’d think the line of guys coming out in the white helmets and blue jersey were a freight train set to run right through Bill Belichick’s team.
And in the beginning, it seemed like that’s just what the Bills were, starting with Nyheim Hines’ 96-yard kickoff return for a touchdown that felt unexplainable in its timing, on the very first play for the team after Hamlin took the hit in Cincinnati.
“We didn’t win the toss and we haven’t won many this year,—I gotta do something about that, I guess,” McDermott said with a laugh. “But when we were receiving after Bill [Belichick] deferred, and even before that, I was like, O.K., wouldn’t it be pretty cool, pretty special if we can return the opening kickoff for a touchdown? And then, of course, they won the toss and deferred, so here you go.”
As McDermott then explained it, there really was nothing to the return itself; it’s how the Bills generally run one. “Guys just executed extremely well,” he says.
From there, around the 20, on the middle return, Hines broke to right, broke a bunch of angles the Patriots had on him, and the foot race was on.
“When he hit it, it was just a surreal moment because in my mind, I’d thought about Wouldn’t that be pretty special?” McDermott says. “You couldn’t script it any better. Honestly, the thing I was worried about the most—and maybe this is just the coach in me—was the response after that and how we would play. Because that’s a pretty high rollercoaster right there.”
He got his answer quickly, with the defense punctuating a three-and-out with Greg Roussaeu’s third-down sack of Mac Jones. It was actually after that when the trouble would come.
In the days leading up to the game, coaches in the NFL rallied around McDermott and his staff, and players with the other 31 teams rallied around Bills players, in the sort of display between competitors you rarely see at the highest level of the sport. But for McDermott, there’s one that stood out above the others.
“Soon after it happened, Bill [Belichick] reached out via text to me, and then separately he reached out to Zac [Taylor] and I both, I thought that was …” McDermott paused. “Nobody else did that, to applaud us and how [Zac and I] handled it. Bill’s seen a lot of games, seen a lot of football, been through a lot of things as a leader and a head coach, and for him to send a text to me—but also, really, I thought it was cool he sent a text to both Zac and I together. That started it.
“And then before the game, he made a point to come over, and I thanked him. He’s just been so gracious with his words and his support. And then for me, again, [Patriots owner] Robert Kraft going out of his way to come over and offer support, especially with the game—we had something on the game too, we had to win to maintain the 2 seed here—but they had a lot on the game in terms of a playoff berth. For them to have the wherewithal to do that in the midst of that, I thought, was very classy.”
The Patriots showed similarly well between the lines after taking those punches early. A Deatrich Wise sack short-circuited the Bills’ first offensive possession, and Jones, who played perhaps his best game of the year, responded with a nine-play, 74-yard drive, capped by an acrobatic touchdown catch from Jakobi Meyers to even the score at 7.
From there, McDermott’s fears did manifest a bit. The teams traded touchdowns in the second quarter. Allen took a sack that ended one drive, and threw a red-zone pick that squandered another scoring chance at the end of the half. The third quarter kicked off with the teams trading turnovers, the second of which gave the Patriots first-and-10 from the Buffalo 11.
Then, the big plays came. The Bills got a red-zone stop after Jonathan Jones forced the Devin Singletary fumble inside the 10. Then, Nyheim Hines ran another kick back, this one for 101 yards, to give Buffalo the lead back, at 21–17. On the Bills’ next possession, Allen found John Brown deep on a scramble play for a 42-yard touchdown. On the possession after that, Allen found Stefon Diggs—who’d Ubered to the hospital to see Hamlin on Monday night before leaving Cincinnati—for a 49-yard score to finish the Patriots.
“That’s huge when you can counter after a momentum shift, and with all three phases contributing,” McDermott says.
It was especially huge in this spot, for Buffalo, because, by then, no one had much left. But what the Bills did have was their 13th win, and the 2 seed. And they had Hamlin.
In the aftermath, McDermott can concede—as big as the plays the Bills were able to summon were, he had a team that was, by 4 p.m. ET, pretty spent.
“I mean, there was juice, but probably not our normal level of juice—and maybe just the guys could only summon up so much,” McDermott says. “It was an emotional week, as everyone knows. I’m not them, so I don’t know exactly [how they’re feeling]. I felt like at halftime, it was calm in a good way, but I was a little bit worried about how much gas they had left in the tank.”
They got a refill afterwards, courtesy of Hamlin himself. In the locker room, after McDermott spoke to the team, backup quarterback Matt Barkley pulled up Hamlin on FaceTime on his cell phone, and the players asked their bed-ridden starting safety to break them down—another great moment in the wake of so many terrifying ones.
And afterward, with the week finally over, McDermott got a few minutes to reflect on all his team, and the region they play in, has been through. The racist mass shooting in mid-May at a Tops market that cost 10 people their lives. Twin snowstorms that crippled Western New York a few weeks apart. And then, on the second day of 2023, Hamlin collapsing.
“They’ve been so …” McDermott says, talking about his team and, again, pausing to choose his words. “They’ve been just amazing all year long, starting with how they handled the Tops situation. I mean, I literally went to them and said, I think we should do something, and they didn’t hesitate. I remember going down there, and it’s a little bit unscripted, right? It was during the spring, and they got off those buses and they served.
“Just the way that they’ve handled everything has been amazing, and the leaders on our team, and our leadership group, I think, has really grown through this.”
McDermott then mentioned how many facets of the organization helped—from COO Ron Raccuia and the business side to GM Brandon Beane and football ops, Derek Boyko and his communications staff and, especially, the medical and training staffs that were flat-out heroic on the field Monday night (Kellington administered the CPR, and head athletic trainer Nate Breske stayed with Hamlin in Cincinnati)—before circling back to the players, again.
They, of course, were the ones out there with Hamlin on Monday night, the ones who’d put themselves at the same risk Hamlin did, and the ones who had to be the organizational bellwether when the time came to go back out on the field.
“When you go through things in life, it really grows you and you gain wisdom through that,” McDermott says. “It makes you better. Having those leaders grow through the things that you mentioned, I think, is really good for our growth as a team. Because at the end of the day, they steer the ship. It’s their rudder in the water that’s steering their ship the most in that locker room. And to have those guys have the experience of the different things that we’ve faced, I think, it really just adds wisdom.”
The tone in McDermott’s voice then changed a little, and he laughed.
“But I would appreciate everybody stopping to talk about everything we’ve been through, because I need a rested team for next weekend.”
He knows there isn’t much time for that. But after the week he, and his team, just had, it’s fair to say they’d consider that a pretty damn good problem to have.
