How can grieving Kansas City Chiefs players, coaches and officials play a home game Sunday against the Carolina Panthers less than 27 hours after 25-year-old linebacker Jovan Belcher allegedly murdered his girlfriend, then committed suicide at the club's Arrowhead Stadium headquarters?
How can Chiefs players compartmentalize an apparent murder-suicide -- witnessed by general manager Scott Pioli and head coach Romeo Crennel in the Arrowhead parking lot -- and do their jobs as if it's just another normal Sunday?
The Chiefs, given the chance to postpone the game, voted to play it as scheduled.
"It's hard to fathom how they go play tomorrow, but people grieve in different ways," Dr. Joel Fish, director of the Center for Sport Psychology in Philadelphia, told USA TODAY Sports. "Sometimes getting back on the horse right away is actually helpful to allowing players to literally move on.
"I couldn't play tomorrow. But grieving doesn't mean just shutting down, taking a week off. I'm not surprised that they're playing. Typically in a situation like this, there will be choices given. People have different ways to grieve, make sense of the trauma and move on."
How the Chiefs cope long-term will have a lot to do with the quality and continuity of grief-counseling they from management, Ph. D. psychotherapist Jay Granat told USA TODAY Sports. The team has announced counselors will be made available.
"A lot of the player healing has to do with how Chiefs management handles the tone and the stuff they do around this -- because when there's a workplace tragedy like this, how management responds is huge,'' said Granat, 60, a New Jersey clinical psychotherapist for more than 25 years.
Belcher and his girlfriend, identified as Kasandra Perkins, 22, by police, leave behind an infant daughter.
"If I ran the team, I would say, 'Let's set up a fund for that child,'" Granat said. "I'd do that pretty promptly, so that the players know they're going to take care of her, that 'She's part of our family.'"
Granat said counseling will be important now and going forward. He predicted an aftershock among Chiefs players and organizational members, the greater Kansas City community and the league beyond Belcher's family and friends.
"This is very much like a tragic loss in a family," Granat said. "That shock and almost denial and unbelievability will be the first stage. That's what the players will be dealing with prior to tomorrow's game. The players won't believe this is real. They'll think it's like a bad dream. And they'll be looking for Jovan in shock, like 'Where is he?' There will be shock and denial and his death won't seem real.
"You typically have grief counselors coming in. But some of the players will feel worse in a couple of weeks. That can be anticipated. The reality of this loss will set in. And some of them will feel worse in a couple of weeks."
Fish said there will be two types of counseling offered and it's important players take advantage of what works best for them.
"The grief counseling usually has a team and a one-to-one component to it, the team one being, 'Let's get all the players together here and talk about this together,'" Fish said. "Because there's something that can be healing about people just being with other people in the same boat in a traumatic situation.
"Then, the organization usually makes the grief counseling available to each individual one-to-one because each person is so different. Who knows what their relationship was with (Belcher) and what experience they've had in their own background with loss and suicide?"
The nightmarish nature of the Belcher murder-suicide likely will weigh heavier and linger longer.
"This is not just a death, it's a murder and a suicide,'' said Granat. "It's obviously the loss of two lives and now a child is orphaned. This is a quadruple trauma in terms of the losses -- a murder and suicide, a crime and then, of course, a child being orphaned.
"And then there's the impact on teammates."
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