A powerful Seahawks Wednesday: Damar Hamlin on minds, ‘but we know what we signed up for’

Players joked, shouting each other’s full names to tease.

Guys lounged on the leather reclining chairs before practice. They scrolled through their phones. They got taped and headed out to yet another workout.

Another Wednesday practice day after a players’ Tuesday off for the Seahawks, the 17th this season. Back to their jobs.

Yet this Wednesday was the only one that began with one of their NFL brothers, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, in intensive care at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. Hamlin went into cardiac arrest on the field during a game two days earlier.

It was the only Seahawks Wednesday ever that began with a team doctor, the director of the University of Washington’s center for sports cardiology, leading a team meeting about cardiac care during games.

“It was a very powerful meeting with the players,” Dr. Jonathan Drezner said.

This was a Wednesday for humanity, as much as football.

It included coach Pete Carroll reminding his players — and, more tellingly, the players reminding him — they aren’t indestructible. They reminded each other their livelihoods, indeed their lives, can end on one play in this sport. They talked about how terrifying that is to their families.

This was the only Wednesday of their football lives they went back to work after watching a fellow NFL player nearly die on the field on national television.

The trauma and the shock of Hamlin collapsing unconscious on the field in Cincinnati on Monday night following a hit and tackle in the Bills-Bengals game have touched Seattle and the entire league.

Some in and around the NFL are wondering if the league should play games this weekend, the final one of the regular season.

The Seahawks believe they should. This is what they do.

But they also know it won’t be the same as a regular Sunday game when they line up against the Los Angeles Rams at Lumen Field.

Said Pro Bowl safety Quandre Diggs: “I think it will be heavy, for sure.”

Seattle wide receiver DK Metcalf just turned 25. He is three months older than Hamlin.

“My heart just goes out to his family, his friends and his teammates that watched that and had to deal with that first-hand,” Metcalf said.

“But we know what we signed up for, every time we go out there and put on our helmet and step on that field.

“It’s just a risk that we all live with.”

Team physician leads team meeting

That inherent risk of playing football has never been more obvious than four days before the Seahawks (8-8) play the Rams (5-11) in a must-win game for Seattle to get into next week’s playoffs, along with Detroit (8-8) having to win at Green Bay (8-8) Sunday night.

“What we are trying to address is the reality of the game that we’re involved with,” Carroll said. “We’ve all bought in to playing this game and built our whole lives around it.

“Whereas we always know that there’s risk, we’re not always faced with the reality that the risks are there. And this moment does remind us to do that again, and realize that this is a dangerous game that we play. ...

“That’s the choices that we make. We make these choices, and we take on these risks. And we do it together.”

Drezner is a team physician for the Washington Huskies athletic department in addition to being a Seahawks physician for years. He met with Seattle’s players Wednesday morning.

“I’m not sure there’s a road map on how to do that in the wake of such an event (as Hamlin’s),” Drezner, a member of the USA Football Medical Advisory Committee, said after that meeting.

“But I think it was a very powerful meeting with the players. I had an opportunity to talk to the players about what we do as a Seahawks medical staff to prepare, with our athletic trainers, with our paramedics, with our airway physicians on the sideline. How we rehearse, and how, the same way they run plays, we are training for the what-if, just in case there is an emergency.”

Drezner said cardiac arrest in intercollegiate athletics are about one in 50,000 per year. In high school athletes, about one in 80,000 athletes per year might have a sudden cardiac arrest. He said male basketball players have the highest risk for cardiac arrest of any sport in the United States.

“(Plus) male football players, and soccer players, those three sports alone make up about 70% of cases of cardiac arrest across the U.S.,” Drezner said.

Emerging among teams, medical professionals and now even players across the country from the Hamlin cardiac arrest: Reinforcing the life-or-death importance of having CPR and a portable, automated external defribrillator immediately available at all sporting events, from the NFL down to youth-league practices and games.

Hamlin is still alive because of the immediate, 9 minutes of CPR he was given plus the AED emergency medical personnel used to resuscitate him on the field Monday night.

“Any of these events should make everyone press pause and think about, do we have everything in place? Is there anything that we can do better?” Drezner said.

Part of the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association’s required training for high school coaches of all sports is a video by Drezner about recognizing and reacting to sudden cardiac arrest on a field. His cardiac arrest training video was done on the Seahawks practice field at the Virginia Mason Athletic Center in Renton.

“Learning from that event, since this is the first cardiac arrest in the NFL in modern time, I think is really important,” Drezner said of Hamlin’s situation.

Quandre Diggs: The risk is worth it

The bottom line to these players: They have made millions; even rookies on the active roster who barely play are making a minimum of $705,000 this season. They have made it, gotten from high school to earn athletic scholarships to play college football and then into the NFL, the highest level of their sport in the world.

The risks of life-changing injury, of conditions such as concussion effects, dementia, arthritis and worse that alter the quality of a player’s life long after playing, of even death, yes, it’s worth it.

Diggs, 29, has earned more than $37 million in his eight NFL seasons. He’s at the top of the sport. He’s a three-time Pro Bowl safety and a Seahawks captain. He signed a $40 million, three-year contract extension with Seattle in March.

He and his fiancee Abby live in a five-bedroom, four-bathroom house in Pflugerville, Texas, just outside Austin where Diggs played at the University of Texas. The national market research group Niche rates Pflugerville among the top 27% of all U.S. suburbs to raise a family.

Diggs and his fiancee have a 3-year-old daughter. They send her to a highly regarded, expensive private school, because of father’s NFL career.

Hell, yes, the risk — the possibility of dying and coming so close to it, as Hamlin has been this week — is worth it to Diggs.

It’s worth it to Metcalf, who played on after a broken neck in college at Mississippi and a doctor telling him years ago he’d never play again. Metcalf signed a contract extension with the Seahawks last summer worth $70 million.

And it’s worth it to so many other players, husbands and fathers from all backgrounds in this league

“This is what we dreamed of as kids. I mean, we knew the risks,” Diggs, the younger brother of former NFL cornerback Quentin Jammer, said.

Diggs fractured his fibula and dislocated his ankle in the 2021 season finale 12 months ago.

“Heck, I would be lying to you guys if I didn’t go out there and that every time and every game at some moment, I think about how I broke my leg. I would be lying if I said I didn’t,” Diggs said. “People don’t see that. People are like, ‘Oh, he’s a robot. He will just go out there and play.’ That’s trauma. That’s real-life trauma. Stuff like that, it’s hard to tune that out.

“Guys that have had serious injuries, have had to be carted off or things like that, you think about that stuff. You think about how my ankle and my leg will never be the same. I will always have 12 or 13 screws in my leg and a tightrope in my ankle.”

Yet, it’s worth it.

“For me — I can only speak on myself, I can’t speak for other guys — for me, I dreamed of this moment since I was a little kid, and I knew what I wanted to do,” Diggs said. “Football doesn’t define me, by any means, but it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do, from following my brother growing up and wanting to follow in his footsteps.

“For me, it’s definitely worth it. You might pay the price for it, you might not. But at the end of the day, you only have one life to live. This is how I want to live my life. Football has done a lot of me, my family, my friends, everything.

“My 3-year-old, she was born into this, you know what I mean? She has to see her daddy go out there and play this game that he chose to play. And she also gets to benefit from her daddy playing this game at a high level. She gets to go to private schools and she gets to do other things that we might not be able to do without football.

“For me it’s worth it.”

But, Diggs also said in the next breath: “Everything has its consequences.”