Dolphins players react with frustration, sadness about Tyreek Hill incident. What they said

Two games in five days always presents a challenge for NFL teams.

Now imagine that police drag the franchise’s star player out of his car and put him in handcuffs just outside the stadium before the home opener. It might be a bit difficult to focus on just football — even with a rivalry game just days away.

That was the case Tuesday afternoon as players expressed a combination of anger, sadness and frustration over what happened to Tyreek Hill and Calais Campbell on Sunday outside of Hard Rock Stadium. Miami-Dade police removed Hill from his car and handcuffed him during a traffic stop. When Campbell tried to intervene and deescalate the situation, he too was handcuffed.

“This isn’t just something that Tyreek went through, this is something that people in general go through,” Tua Tagovailoa said. “That’s a life thing. Like football, we’re blessed to do this. We’re blessed to be able to play this sport. We’re blessed to make all this money to do what we love for fun. But [what happened to Hill is] real life.”

The body camera footage, which police released Monday evening, made Hill’s situation all the more real. Defensive lineman Zach Sieler said the video “shook my wife and I.” Receiver Braxton called it “very bothersome to see.” And Tagovailoa said it made him “emotional.”

“Hearing Tyreek’s voice in the footage, it was a little emotional,” Tagovailoa explained. “I don’t know exactly how I would have dealt with that situation. I’ve never been through any of that growing up in Hawaii…. It could have been de-escalated another way. I don’t think it was done the right way.”

Dolphins left tackle Terron Armstead agreed that the police were too aggressive.

“It was unnecessary to me,” Armstead said. The footage stirred “a combination of emotions — frustration, sad, feeling for ‘Reek. Nothing I feel like warranted the reaction. Anytime you get physical for a traffic stop, it isn’t going to end too well.”

After an emotional news conference Monday, coach Mike McDaniel discussed the issue on Tuesday, according to safety Jevón Holland.

“I feel like it’s an elephant in the room if you don’t address it,” Holland said. “It’s a human situation and I think it needs to be brought up especially [because] 90 percent of the league is Black and you know the white people that are in the league all love Black people and black people love white people.”

Added Holland: “I think it’s important that everybody talks about it and Mike being biracial himself is definitely caught in the middle of that. It was good that he brought it up and he expressed his views and his emotions.”

Following Sunday’s victory over the Jaguars, Holland said what happened to Hill was “a very common thing in America that needs to be addressed on a countrywide level.” His comments have since gone viral and during Tuesday’s locker room availability, he patiently answered questions for 10 minutes.

“It was crazy, but I’m not surprised,” he said, later adding that “it’s unfortunate that we’re still talking about the same thing after so long” considering what happened to Rodney King and George Floyd. “I’m 24. There’s been a bunch of very unsettling and disturbing videos, body cam footage over and over again since Twitter has been a thing. And so I would like to be more shocked and surprised, but I’m not. And I think that’s just the society that we live in.”

“You see the vocabulary and the language that’s used [by police] and the demeanor and the aggression and then everybody’s asking like how do we fix it?” Holland continued. “Everybody’s memory nowadays is pretty short sighted so it kind of just gets brushed under the rug and then you kind of move on to the next situation until it happens again. Yeah, it’s unfortunate.... But like Tyreek said, there are good police officers out there.”

With a matchup against the Buffalo Bills set for Thursday, the Dolphins have to try to momentarily shut out the events of the last 48 hours to focus on a formidable AFC East foe that has given repeatedly given them trouble in recent years. Tagovailoa, however, shared that Hill already has begun discussions with several teammates about how they can “help change some things” in the coming weeks.

“He’s come up with a couple of ideas,” Tagovailoa said. “We will worry about this week. Next week, we’ll get back together and talk about how we can do something to help change what is going on right in our backyard.”

Tagovailoa’s comments give credence to possibly the only positive outcome of Hill’s situation other than the increased spotlight on racial profiling: the team might be much closer now than ever.

“This kind of brought us a little bit closer together,” Berrios said. “The focus is on the Bills but this is something that we’ll figure out, move forward with, learn from, get better from. But this is a big week.”