Ty Dunne, GoLongTD.com Founder

When you need to know what's happening, it's it's it's it's time to get in the huddle.

This sham with Steve Keim out there in the desert. I mean, it's like no accountability. Never my fault. It's never his fault. Stuff just happens.

Losses just fall from the sky. It's not his fault. It's not Kylie's fault. It's not my fault.

It's not the owner's fault. We just have really bad luck. Just hang in there and keep throwing money at us and we'll figure it out. Shut up. Listen to In the Huddle, available on the Ozzy app or wherever you get your podcast.

When you need to know what's happening, it's it's it's it's time to get it in the huddle. You're fraudulent. You're not in the business of winning football games. You're in the business of trying to prove your own asinine decisions.

Correct. We can talk about the hearsay thing. Do I think the Saturday thing is the biggest joke in the history of the NFL? I do. But at least he was going to say this ain't working for me.

I don't care that I just gave him extensions. Listen to In the Huddle, available on the Ozzy app or wherever you get your podcast. Tydon, appreciate the time. Thank you. How are you? I'm good, man.

How you been? Great to reconnect you. Thanks for having me. Yeah.

Thanks so much for joining us. So, you know, DeMar Hamlin, obviously a little bit. You did the feature piece on him back in July of twenty one twenty twenty one when you wrote why DeMar Hamlin is exactly what the Buffalo Bills need. Can you just tell us more about who DeMar Hamlin is? No doubt about it. This is somebody who, you know, I think we're around this game and there's a lot of football players who are are talented. Maybe they enjoy the game a little bit, but when they wake up in the morning, it's kind of punch in, punch out.

They're very good at their job, but maybe don't necessarily have that that vision, that purpose, that that reason to get up in the morning and go to that practice field and do something. DeMar Hamlin has always had that purpose. And it really does have its roots in McKees Rocks, just outside of Pittsburgh, where, you know, as early I guess you start here when he's 12 years old, he's in a courtroom and he can picture his dad getting taken away to prison and sentenced to 10 years. He spent three and a half years behind bars. So at a very fragile point of his life, he loses his dad simultaneously. So many of his friends are catching stray bullets, get involved with the street and you don't even have to be involved.

Sometimes it's just wrong place, wrong time. He estimates that more than half of his childhood friends died before the age of 21. Meanwhile, you know, there's winters in Pittsburgh where they're unable to heat their home and it just breaks.

So you're finding ways to stay warm. There's days at school where he doesn't have a lunch. Maybe a buddy gives him a couple bites of his sandwich. He's helping his mom at her cleaning business till midnight and she's just doing an unbelievable job of kind of shielding him from those bad influences in the streets. He's always wanted to make an impact on future DeMar Hamlins, on kids just like him in this environment who need hope, who need an image, something to aspire to be. So that's why he stayed at Pitt. I mean, he could have gone to Clemson, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Penn State, 48 scholarship offers. He stayed home because he also had a little brother he knew who needed to look up to somebody. So it's always been bigger than football for DeMar Hamlin.

Now, you've done a ton of feature pieces and every time you release a feature piece, it's always a must read. How did you come across this story in particular? Because, you know, this is someone back when he gets drafted, he's a six round pick and you wrote that he is exactly what they needed, which is a pretty telling statement at the time. Yeah. You know, I guess when it comes to the actual football, which is, it's so weird to even wrap our brains around football still after seeing a player get CPR for nine minutes on a field. But, you know, it was, I was just looking at the team, you know, they, they were going to about, about to pay Josh Allen a lot of money. And as we know, with these quarterbacks, with these teams, when you pay the quarterback a lot of money, that kind of re-emphasizes the draft and need to find some gems late and late in the rounds, late rounds, you know, uh, he was drafted, I think 212th overall in the sixth round. So I looked him up, did a little, you know, I'm no draft expert, but I'm like, yeah, this guy's got a little game to him. Fearless, make some plays around the ball and Jordan Poirier, Micah Hyde, they're not going to be around forever.

They're, they're such mainstays that the Bills haven't really experienced life without these guys. Um, DeMar Hamlin could be a player that they need to rely on. So I just reached out to him and his representatives and, and today I saw on Twitter, he was asking fans for the best wing spot in Western New York and they filled him in. They told him Barbell and elbows.

He already went to Barbell. I'm actually on my way to Elmo's right now, believe it or not. I'm returning to where I hung out with DeMar. And, um, yeah, he said, he's all about Elmo's was all about, you know, getting the Buffalo experience. So we went there and they brought out four plates of wings.

So I really do think that we devoured all 40 wings when we were there with fries on the side. Ty Dunn here with us. It's been so tough, uh, clearly since Monday, everyone's been affected by it. Just how did you process over the last few days of what we unfortunately had to see on Monday night? And obviously we're all thinking about DeMar Hamlin and hope that, uh, he could come out of this.

Okay. God, you hope and you pray, that's all you can do is just pray and pray and pray and, and really, you know, speak to your loved ones like, like he does. And that's probably what stuck with me the most when, when I realized who it was down on the field, my first thought went to his parents because I figured Pittsburgh's only four and a half hours away. They're in the stands somewhere. They're, they're seeing a body, you know, are they seeing the CPR? Are they, are they just seeing this body loaded into an ambulance, that ambulance driving off and, and they don't know, they don't know, you know, if he's alive. I mean, that's where my mind went. What's mom thinking right now? We don't know.

Nobody knows. Um, and then I thought back to a comment he made where he said that growing up, how he grew up in McKees rocks, you get, you get into the habit of telling people you love them. You end every conversation with, I love you because you don't know what's going to happen.

You don't know what tomorrow holds, especially in that neighborhood. So if we take anything from this all, um, I think it's that, you know, I mean, Hey, if you got, if you got an extra $20, put it toward his toy drive. It's unreal. The generosity of people around the country with that's done.

Uh, but just, just tell your loved ones you love them. Cause that's something DeMar really does all the time with everybody close to him. I know NFL locker rooms are a special place and I'm sure all around the league, you could say, Oh, it's a, it's a tight knit group, but just knowing some of those players are on the Buffalo bills and, and seeing some of their Instagram lives at everything throughout the season, it's really a fun environment. And they've been in a lot of big moments in Buffalo.

I just don't know. And I know, right. They're athletes that they're kind of wired that way, but this is just so different than anything we've ever seen. I don't know how they play coming up on Sunday and how they find a way to go out on the field after what they just saw earlier this week on Monday, tie.

I I'm with you. It's a, it's an unbelievably tight knit team. I hadn't really seen a team that's this close and it, cause it's real. Like you said, it's real.

It's authentic. They've been through a lot together, you know, on the field, obviously they've been knocking on the door, uh, for a few years now as a super bowl contender. But I mean, just living here in Western New York, there's just been two massive snow storms, um, that have affected the team and their day to day lives, let alone taking lives. I don't even know what the real number is. They tell us it's in the forties or fifties. I, I'm skeptical.

I think it's much higher than that. You know, we had the shooting at tops, which feels like light years ago, really wasn't that long ago. And the team was very involved in trying to uplift the community through that. They've been through a lot of non football stuff and they all, this team in the city always finds a way to turn something really, really dark, really, really negative into a positive. And I think we're seeing that right now with Tamar Hamlin, which obviously this, this, this trauma, this tragedy kind of tops them all at least with the team.

Um, I don't know how they play football game. I do know that football players are not wired like you and I psychologically they're, they're, they're, they're used to just kind of stepping back onto that battlefield, but this feels like it crossed some new threshold that we've never experienced ever. So I think that their mindset's directly tied to Tamar Hamlin's recovery.

If Tamar continues to show progress and there's been some good signs so far, then they're probably gonna feel better as a team and maybe they inch their way towards playing football again. Um, but it's, you're right, I'm with you. It just seems farfetched at the moment. But what obviously makes this one so, so difficult is it happened right on the field. How many times Ty, do we hear players who lose a loved one, um, and they go to the facility to kind of use it as a distraction to get away from what's going on at home. It's, you go into that facility today, you see his locker, you're in a positional meeting room, you're thinking, okay, he should be there. There's just no distraction from this, from those players. And you just hope that the mental health side of it, and I know that the Bills have had a lot of resources even before this allocated to that in their organization with the Pugula family and the way that Brandon Bean and Sean McDermott have run it. I just really, I fear for some of the mental health of these players just because there's no getting away from something like this.

I totally agree. I don't know what conversations can be had to help you get through this other than that phenomenal news that we're all praying. Someone is opening his eyes. He's with his family. He's seen the love.

He's seen the support that he's on his way toward being himself again. Sort of that, I'm not sure what helps you get over. I don't think anything really is going to help these guys get over it, but they'll always be part of them some way, somehow. And in some way, somehow you have to rally around it because you can't hide from it. You can't compartmentalize this, right? It's not like you just shove it into the back of your brain and start game planning for the New England Patriots.

It's gotta be at the forefront. You've got to use it somehow. And I just don't know why. I don't know how. All I know is professional football players, like I said, they are modern day gladiators that are playing the most violent game on earth and they are wired differently.

So I don't know. I'm kind of talking in circles here because I really don't know how they play a football game. Ty Dunn, before we let you run, just two things from a football standpoint. Have you heard anything about if the league was actually trying to resume that? We were all watching it and you hear Joe Buck say that they're going to resume in five minutes. And then just from afar, it looks like McDermott and Zach Taylor basically made sure that that didn't happen with their conversations.

Right. We're all very skeptical of how the NFL conducts business. I would just be kind of guessing, but the five minute thing always kind of struck me as very procedural. Like Monday Night Football, everything's kind of to the book.

You're in, you're out, you got commercial breaks. Maybe they were just very mechanical from a game production standpoint and they weren't taking the human element into it. I sure would hope it's not like the commissioner is up on some throne demanding players to report back to the field in five minutes.

I don't think it was anything like that. And you're right. Kudos to Sean McDermott, Zach Taylor, the players all taking matters into their own hands and Sean saying, look, I can't coach a football game. We can't play a football game. We got to get to Tamar Hamlin right now.

And that's absolutely where the focus should have been then and where the focus still should be, what, 48, 72 hours later. But last thing I'll ask you, Ty, I know that people are wondering what's going to happen with this schedule. Do they even play this Bills-Bengals game ever again? You know, it's all trivial in the large scheme of things, but do you expect there to be football this weekend?

I know we haven't got the announcement there's not going to be football, but do you think they're just they're waiting or do you think they're just going on and planning that there's going to be football this weekend? For the Buffalo Bills or the whole NFL? The whole NFL, right?

Isn't it kind of you got to have everyone play or no one play, really? Yeah, I think I think the NFL is at least the sense I get is it's going it's going to play on the league that these these games are going to happen and they'll find a way. But yeah, the human side of this is that you can't just ignore the emotions that all of these players are feeling. I mean, I mean, maybe the NFLPA, all the players, if they really feel strongly about it, they they take a stand. But I feel like there will be football games that this we've seen this this game and this shield kind of move forward through quite a bit. And as tragic as this is, I do think there will be football game. Now, the Buffalo Bill has a different story here in Buffalo.

I'm not sure how the players who witnessed this all move on right now. But yeah, I do feel like we will be talking about football before we know what you could read the article that he wrote. And this is back to July 9th, 2021. It's a great read. Why?

DeMar Hamlin is exactly what the Buffalo Bills need at go long TD dot com. He is tied done tie. Hang in there. Be all right. We appreciate you giving us a few minutes today. No, thank you, Zach.

Really appreciate you having me on and sharing tomorrow's story. No one's more locked into the NFL than first and pod. Why is it not within the realm of possibility that Geno Smith was a victim of a horrible organization, bad offensive coaching, and then went and played behind three high level talents and only got spot starts and did OK, by the way?

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If I ever saw one of those giant statues, I probably would poop my pants. Listen and subscribe on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcast from. When you need to know what's happening, it's it's it's it's time to get in the huddle. You're fraudulent. You're not in the business of winning football games. You're in the business of trying to prove your own asinine decisions.

Correct. We can talk about the hearsay thing. Do I think the Saturday thing is the biggest joke in the history of the NFL? I do. But at least he was to say this ain't working for me.

I don't care that I just gave him extensions. Listen to In the Huddle available on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcast.