Like the rest of you, I’m watching in horror at what’s happening in Houston right now.
On the football side, it appears that New Orleans could be the first option but even that must be a sticky proposition right now and I’ll go into that later in this blog.
But before I do, I’d prefer to address the “real world” issue by saying that i was up late and into the early morning tracking this storm because I have some other vested interests.
I have family in Houston. I have friends in Houston. I have some really great memories of Houston. But seeing this storm roll through has been painful. We’re all praying for them but it looks quite messy and devastating. Glass everywhere downtown, buildings just devastated.
Back to Ravens football and the game: Yesterday I took a straw poll of all of the folks around WNST and none of us really believed they were going to be playing this football game on Monday night at Reliant Stadium. All you had to do was look at the storm and see its tracking and know this was a bad situation.
Now word comes out of Houston that Reliant Stadium has roof damage and that the “game is off” according to the newspaper.
The Ravens have no official word. The league officials must be scrambling but, honestly, had to see this coming. There’s a conference call slated for later in the afternoon.
8
We’ve all heard about the “skip the bye week” schedule change. We’ve all heard about the possibility of a doubleheader in Dallas on Monday night (not realistic because of staff, warmups, hotel evacuaees from Houston and locker rooms…this would be a stretch). We’ve all heard about moving the game to New Orleans — probably the frontrunner simple because of distance and availability — or Atlanta and play in front of an empty house.
But I can’t fathom how the city is going to be able to provide any transportation to get the Houston Texans out of the city to play a game anywhere. The airport might not be available. And any buses might be hard to find given the carnage that this storm will leave behind.
I’m just saying…
The NFL folks are pretty smart about this stuff, but I wondered aloud a few times yesterday whether they shouldn’t have tried to get the team out of Houston before the storm. If New Orleans was the place, then why aren’t they already there? If Houston was fine after the storm, which always appeared to be a stretch/wish, it would be easy to get the Texans players/staff back into town. I checked the web hard to see if they did “evacuate” or “escape” but I see no evidence of that.
Like the rest of you, I’m just watching and reacting.
But how would the league mobilize a travelling party of 120 people in the Texans organization to fly or bus or drive anywhere tomorrow morning when Gary Kubiak’s cellphone might not work and there might be a tree blocking Matt Schaub’s car. Chances are most of the team doesn’t have electricity at this point.
And it ain’t like they’re gonna call a cab to get them somewhere.
8Maybe the team spent the evening at a downtown hotel, but those are the very buildings that every CNN report said would be the most dangerous with glass windows and height in a storm of this magnitude. And the aftermath of the downtown glass destruction is now evident.
Strange days indeed…
More to come for sure…
