The Bills and the NFL have announced a series of tributes for Damar Hamlin, who suffered a life-threatening injury during Monday night’s game against the Bengals and is still hospitalized in Cincinnati.
Here’s a rundown of the tributes:
- The Bills will debut a jersey patch featuring Hamlin’s uniform number, 3, for this Sunday’s game against the Patriots. (Although the announcement didn’t specify whether the patch would be worn beyond this Sunday, it seems highly likely that the Bills, who have already clinched a playoff spot, will keep wearing the patch in the postseason.)
- Bills sideline personnel will wear “3” pins on Sunday.
- The Bills will outline the “3” in each 30-yard line number in royal blue this Sunday. Other NFL teams have the option to do this as well for Week 18, in either royal blue or red.
- The Bills will wear royal blue “Love for Damar 3” shirts for pregame warm-ups. Other teams will have the option of wearing the same design, but in black.
- Bills personnel will be issued “3” caps for pregame activities.
The final weekend of the NFL regular season begins with two games tomorrow, and then a full slate of games on Sunday.
I love the patch, I think it’s a great idea and very tastefully done. I like that it’s rendered in white, to represent the jerseys that Damar and the Bills were wearing at the time of the incident. I’m glad the number (3-colors) is accurate to correspond to the numbers on the Bills’ white jerseys. Great job, Bills!
All of the teams wearing that patch would be a nice touch. If not, at least the Bengals.
At the risk of sounding like Skip Bayless, doesn’t a memorial decal for a living player seem a little… weird?
1) It’s a patch, not a decal.
2) It’s not a memorial patch; it’s a “you’re in our thoughts” patch.
I have a long standing problem calling patches decals so apologies there.
Still seems weird to me, no matter what the adjective before “patch”. The man is not dead.
This is where baseball, allowing playera to do their own little things on hats and cleats, does it right.
This opens up an interesting can of worms: patches worn for players still active. The first one that comes to mind for me is Mike Modano wearing the North Stars 25th anniversary patch which had himself on it. link
link
Or Patrick Marleau a couple seasons ago wearing a patch celebrating himself
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I understand Hamlin won’t be wearing that patch, but it falls under that category of a patch worn for an ‘active’ player.
Here’s another example: link
Lots of additional info here: link
I think the patch and the hats looked very nice, also the coaches of other teams wearing those black shirts. The level of empathy is huge in the NFL and I was a bit surprised by that. Very nice, though.