Davis leaves field during NFL game, then abruptly retires
The Buffalo Bills are bad. Some say very, very bad.
And on Sunday, as the National Football League team was once again getting blasted — the Bills were down by 28-6 at halftime — one of its most decorated players decided he no longer wanted to play.
In a puzzling and highly unusual move, cornerback Vontae Davis, a former firstround pick and two-time Pro Bowler, “pulled himself out of the game,” according to coach Sean McDermott. “He communicated to us that he was done,” McDermott added.
As it turned out, Davis did more than just skip out on the second half. He retired from the NFL altogether. Davis, 30, made no allusion to the Bills’ early-season struggles in a statement he posted on Instagram, pointing instead to health concerns.
“This isn’t how I pictured retiring from the NFL,” he said. But after several injuries and multiple operations over his 10-year career, he said, “Today on the field, reality hit me fast and hard: I shouldn’t be out there anymore.”
Before Davis’s announcement, one of his teammates, linebacker Lorenzo Alexander, publicly criticized him for “quitting on us in the middle of the game.”
“Never have seen it ever — Pop Warner, high school, college, pros,” Alexander told reporters.
“It’s just completely disrespectful to his teammates.”
Davis, who signed a one-year, $5-million contract with Buffalo in February after spending seasons with the Miami Dolphins and the Indianapolis Colts, said he meant “no disrespect” to his teammates and coaches and called the decision to retire “overwhelming.”
“I had an honest moment with myself,” he said, adding that he also wondered, “Do I want to keep sacrificing?”
He continued: “Truthfully, I do not because the season is long, and it’s more important to me and my family to walk away healthy than to wilfully embrace the warrior mentality and limp away too late.”
After playing all but 13 games in his first eight seasons, Davis missed 11 last year because of a lingering groin injury. He had at least three concussions in his NFL career, along with a broken wrist and hamstring and knee and foot sprains.
In recent years, as more information has emerged about the connection between repeated blows to the head and the degenerative disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, some players have chosen to retire despite remaining productive on the field.