During Saturday night’s frigid game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins, Chiefs star quarterback Patrick Mahomes took a hit that caused a chunk of his helmet to break off. Making matters worse, the officials did not immediately stop the game, simply allowing Mahomes to continue playing with a clearly broken helmet. And one NFL insider is not happy about it.
In a column posted on Wednesday morning, NFL insider Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk called it “a horrible look” that the NFL allowed Mahomes to continue playing after his helmet broke on the field, especially considering how many people could have stopped the play.
“Clearly, it’s a horrible look from a health-and-safety standpoint to have a player’s helmet literally break and for a piece of it to go flying and to have no one do anything about it. The officials didn’t. The replay assistant didn’t. The spotters didn’t. No one did anything,” Florio wrote for Pro Football Talk.
“It could be another example of the NFL having too many people who have the power to stop play and that no one specific person has the gumption to do it, waiting instead for someone else to act. Likewise, it’s possible no one even knew what the protocol would have been after the proverbial ‘stop’ button was pressed. Remove Mahomes and require a backup to play until he has a sufficient helmet? Stop the game until he can get another helmet?”
We’ll have to see if the league makes any changes to its process after this incident.
