No Game Monday
At least, not in Houston. The Houston Chronicle is reporting that Reliant Stadium is too damaged to use, and the game is “off”.
No word beyond that as of now.
UPDATE: the game has been moved to November 9th, and both the Ravens and the Texans will, effectively, lose their bye week. I also want to note that this news came first via the WNST text, and I then put the thread up for discussion purposes. I should have made that clear originally.
ugh ravens/texans game postponed until november 9th.
how the nfl fucked this up is beyond me. didn’t the saints play a home game against the giants in new york after katrina?
wasn’t the proclamation “if you don’t leave you will certainly die” enough information to just move the game to baltimore or a neutral sight?
now our favorite geriatric team gets to play the whole season without a significant bye. yay.
Yeah, I’m with BBM. I was in Best Buy nursing a killer hangover when I got the information and all I could think was that the NFL really boned on this one. Although I’m sure they figured moving it back 30 hours was more than enough time to recover from a direct hit from a hurricane.
Well done.
I’ve nursed my share of killer hangovers in Best Buy…
Totally agreed with both of you — it’s hard to imagine how the league managed to botch this as badly as they did. This absolutely screws both teams. A bye in week two? Ugly.
Drew makes a great point about this in his latest blog post. I just read that and I gotta say that he’s pretty much right on.
Well great. Now Drew made me feel like a dickhead, because I think the NFL bungled this in the face of common sense. He makes a good point, in that football is not important to those hurting families…except I feel (perhaps erroneously) like sports are among our most important forms of escapism and therefore also healing. I’ve been sitting here all day hearing sportscasters (well, instead of sportscasters it’s been Michael Kay and John Flaherty, but they’re pretty close to sportscasters) talk about how their overwhelming sense of unity and healing after 9/11 was seeing “I love NY” plastered around Fenway Park or U.S. Cellular Field once baseball got started again. I personally remember the tunnel fires in Baltimore before that and how scary that was for myself and the people I know who spend a lot of time in Baltimore and how being able to go down to the game and watch the Orioles lose again felt like moving on past tragedies, human made or otherwise.
Anyway, that’s my retort I guess. Also the fact that now I look stupid for chanting Let’s Go Flac-co at the top of lungs while drunk last night. Thanks a lot for that, NFL.
The point you make is still valid, though, both in terms of the NFL bungling this and in terms of sports remaining important even in the face of trying circumstances.
What the league should have done is have a little more foresight and schedule an alternate site early on. By initially moving the game to Monday — which I’m pretty sure nobody really thought would work — and then shuffling/eliminating the bye weeks, they screwed up.
A well-planned neutral site game on Monday night could have given the teams and the NFL a chance to not only play — which I agree has a benefit — but also to maybe hold a fundraiser or a food drive and do something positive. That kind of thing would have only worked, though, if the decision had been made on, say, Thursday.
Where I think Drew is right on is in pointing out that the thing that matters now — after the fact — is the city of Houston. Hopefully the league will be on top of this kind of thing the next time it happens.
That’s fair. Right now there’s no sense in bemoaning our terrible condition in the NFL compared to real people’s real terrible conditions in Texas. But there’s no way this was even in the top 10 best outcomes given Ike.
Not that we ever end up in the top 10 in the face of God’s fury.
If any of you listen to David Cross’s standup comedy albums, he has a track where he speaks about the fact the the NFL cancelled football for a week after 9/11 and how despite the flag waving across the country, everyone still kinda groaned about cancelling football.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5tldEQg6is (some nsfw language)
drew’s blog has nothing to do with the fans’ annoyance at the nfl.
OF COURSE the game can’t and shouldn’t be played now.
OF COURSE there are more important things to address in texas now.
but everyone saw this coming and i’m sure there could have been a contingency plan that allowed houston to recoup some lost money from a lost game.
now the ravens are fucked. mark my words. fucked.
watch them be 6-4 in week 11 and start to drop like flies.
Neal, I wonder if you would have linked Drew’s blog at all if it had been praising the Ravens and not the NFL, or better yet if it had been praising the Orioles. You only link stuff that agrees with your mentality here and that stinks. You never link to my stuff and I’m a whiner about it. Whine whine whine whine whine.