The Right Choice

As Poseur posted yesterday, the game against Troy is off.  It's rescheduled for November 15.  

The results of yesterday's poll would indicate that this is an unpopular choice, but I agree with it wholeheartedly.

My parents live in Gonzales, which is about 30 minutes away from Baton Rouge (and incidentally, it's also the hometown of Glenn Dorsey, who I may just claim as another cousin of mine).  I've talked to them each of the last couple of days, and it's not good there.  We're not talking about a few limbs down.  We're talking about trees down all over the city, and all over the surrounding cities, and all over the spaces between the cities.  Big trees.  And they took things out when they fell.  Important things.  Things that can't be fixed quickly, at least not in the aggregate.

Latest estimates are that 1.4 million people are without power in and around Baton Rouge and New Orleans, but mostly around Baton Rouge.  1.4 million is an awful lot of people, and they're not getting power back today and probably not tomorrow.  Some of them won't get power back for a month.  

A lot of people don't even have a reliable way to prepare food right now.   Think about it.  If you don't have electricity, how do you cook food?  You might have a gas grill, but how do you store the food safely without a refrigerator?  And what do you do when you run out of propane?  I guess you can go get more, but then what do you do when the propane dealer, having experienced a once-in-a-lifetime run on propane, runs out?  You better have a stocked pantry of food that need not be cooked.

This is an environment where people have to expend all their energy just to get from day to day and try to clean up and maybe fix what's been damaged.  Then you have the evacuees who are just trying to get back home. 

Football is a big production.  You have media; you have tailgaters arriving on Wednesday for a Saturday game; you have a visiting team that needs hotels to stay in; you have visiting fans that need to make it in; you have restaurants that need to be fully staffed and fully functional; you have to have portable toilets in place to accommodate all the people; you have to have ice for the concession stands; you have to have thousands of little things that Baton Rouge would have a very hard time providing right now.  To try to put on such a big production during this sort of event would be, I think, foolish.  As Mrs. ATVS said, "There's being resilient, and then there's just fiddling while Rome burns."  Putting on an LSU football game during this is fiddling, particularly when the game can be easily rescheduled.

I am receptive to arguments that the team needs the game.  Heck, reports are that the players themselves really wanted to play.  The team needs to get sharper in preparation for Auburn in two weeks.  However, it's also undisputed that LSU's practice situation this week is difficult, as the team could not practice on Monday, had only a light practice on Tuesday, and whatever they did on Wednesday (reports are sketchy at the moment) would have been under a cloud of uncertainty and on damaged fields.  Would the team really get sharper playing a game like that?

I am as anxious as anyone to get this season going properly, but there's "determined" and then there's "irrational".  Playing now would be irrational.