I think he’s an inspiration, I applaud him for what he’s done. Heck I donated to his charity. But he’s mostly great for non-football stuff.
There’s a non-zero chance that if he hadn’t got hurt last year, he wouldn’t be on the Bills anymore. But there was no way they were going to cut him after that.
Was he week-to-week contract or for the entire year? I’m way out of touch with football, but they used to sign guys for individual games when they were on the very edge of, well, not being in the NFL.
He signed a four year contract in 2021, but only a very small amount was guaranteed, so they could’ve easily cut him this last off-season.
Since he is still on the 52 man roster he still gets his full contract amount. If he were dropped to the practice squad he would be getting paid $12,000 a week (maybe $16,000 not sure if he’s considered a veteran). He is currently making $940,000 a season. The league minimum is $750,000. If he were placed on the practice squad another team could claim him.
That does still happen. It seems uncommon, at least I don’t hear about it very often, but I’ve seen it in recent years. Especially if you have a guy who has retired or is on the verge of retiring, and they just need that person for one game, either to fill a temporary spot or for a symbolic reason.
The very first example to pop in my head was this one.
In the news again. (Gift link).
(Normal link to same article.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/nyregion/damar-hamlin-buffalo-bills-cardiac-arrest.html
He Nearly Died on the Football Field. Is That Why Everybody Loves Him?
Damar Hamlin’s heart stopped beating after a tackle on “Monday Night Football” in 2023. He wants to be known for more than that.
Good luck with that. He’s a defensive back. He’s wildly overestimating the public’s attention span for sports celebrities. We’ve got enough space in our heads for about 6 quarterbacks, 2 wide receivers, a couple of Cy Young winners, the last guy to win the Home Run Derby, and maybe on occasion, if the weather cooperates, a European soccer player.
He’ll be known to Bills fans for his plays, his division rivals’ fans as someone the announcers say from time to time, and to everyone else as the guy who collapsed on field.
And he’s not a particularly good defensive back, either. He’s only had 2 interceptions in his five-year NFL career.
But I think it’s safe to say he’s probably got a lifetime job with the Bills, if not as a player, then in the front office doing something.
He’s not bad, but he’s not a star. He was a starting safety for the Bills (a good team) in 2022 (the season in which he suffered the injury in the season finale), and in 2024. Last year, he was third on the team in total tackles, and second on the team in solo tackles.
Pro Football Reference has a metric called “Approximate Value” (AV), which is their attempt to create a stat not unlike baseball’s WAR to assess the total performance of a player in a season. It’s a squishy number, and hard to compare across positions, but they gave Hamlin a 5 AV in 2022 and 2024; the 5 puts him on the lower end of the Bills’ defensive starters last year, but I don’t see anything to suggest he’s atrocious, or at least that he was bad last year. This year, he’s not starting, and apparently not playing very much – he’s been in five games, with only 61 total snaps played (mostly on special teams).
Hamlin is currently on injured reserve. He suffered a pectoral injury during a practice on October 9 and was put on IR, guaranteeing that he would miss at least four games.
That’s explain not playing in many games this year. He’d lost his starting role this season as well.