Buffalo Bills cornerback Vontae Davis walked off the field at halftime of the Bills game against the San Diego Chargers and didn’t return. Instead of running back onto the field with his teammates, the two-time Pro-Bowler decided to retire. Davis told Bills head coach Sean McDermott he was “done” according to news report.
Several of Davis’ teammates insinuated that his actions let the team down, including linebacker Lorenzo Alexander, who was quoted in the New York Times Monday.
“Never have seen it ever — Pop Warner, high school, college, pros,” Alexander told reporters. “It’s just completely disrespectful to his teammates.”
All around the country, Davis has been taking a heat for his decision to retire, including Buffalo News sports writer Jason Wolf, who wrote the Bills were better off without Davis. Except, he’s wrong.
At 0-2, the Buffalo Bills are frontrunners to become the most hapless team in the National Football League, a title that used to belong to the Cleveland Browns. The Browns look like they might actually be good this year, and while they’ve yet to win a single game, any armchair quarterback worth his salt would rather go all in on the Browns than be forced to sit through another game at New Era Field.
The Bills could’ve used Davis, a two-time Pro-Bowler with the Indianapolis Colts. His sudden retirement, along with injuries to other players on the roster leaves a gaping hole at cornerback, a skill position the Bills, victims of a 47-3 drubbing by the Baltimore Ravens in the first week of the season, could have sorely used.
But Davis wasn’t interested. According to news reports, he told McDermott at halftime he intended to retire. By the time his teammates were jogging back out onto the field to face the Chargers, Davis was already on his way home. That night he issued a statement on Twitter through the league, thanking fans, while also acknowledging the circumstances surrounding his sudden departure.
In his statement, Davis admitted “this wasn’t how I pictured retiring from the NFL” but said he felt it was time to walk away from the game once he realized he no longer wanted to keep sacrificing.
“And truthfully, I do not, because the season is long, and it’s more important for me and family to walk away healthy than embrace the warrior mentality and limp away too late,” Davis wrote.
Davis isn’t the first high profile athlete to leave the NFL over health concerns, and he’s unlikely to be the last. Across the league health concerns, triggered by research on Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in people with a history of repetitive brain trauma (often athletes), including symptomatic concussions as well as asymptomatic subconcussive hits to the head that do not cause symptoms. In July of 2017, a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association led by Dr. Anna McKee, a neuropathologist showed that of 111 former NFL players who were tested, all but one showed signs of CTE.
Even leading professional athletes like Davis aren’t immune to CTE, something the cornerback referenced in his statement. Last year, Davis underwent season ending surgery after being released by the Colts.
“I’ve endured multiple surgeries and played through many different injuries throughout my career and, over the last few weeks this was the latest physical challenge,” Davis wrote. “But today on the field, reality hit me hard and fast: I shouldn’t be out there anymore.”
All across America, in locker rooms, in living rooms and on social media you’ll hear plenty of hot takes about Davis. That he’s a quitter, that he let the team down, that he had an obligation.
Davis is one of the lucky ones. He got out, hopefully before it’s too late. His status, combined with the contracts he’s signed over the years, gave him the courage to walk away from the game. Others, like Chargers’ star Junior Seau, didn’t get the same chance. Seau did it the “right” way, retiring from football at the end of the 2009 season. Three years later, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. His family donated his brain to science, where researchers discovered Seau had suffered brain damage that was consistent with repeated head injuries. He was 43 years old.
It’s only just beginning, but football is in the midst of a gradual decline. Participation is down amongst high schoolers, television ratings have dropped. Pundits will tell you the ratings are still high, and that plenty of kids are still showing up for two-a-day practices with the summer sun beating down on them mercilessly.
Maybe it’s time for viewers to make the same choice Davis did, and leave the game behind before it’s too late.
Contact David Dolmage at
ddolmage@newtondailynews.com