From Ivan Maisel's blog on ESPN Insider:
My good friend Mark Blaudschun, the Boston Globe college football guy who knows things before the people who are supposed to know them know them, called me Monday and said, "We may have to deal with the remnants of the hurricane this weekend."
He was talking about Ernesto, which is projected, as I type, to roll through Georgia and continue up the Atlantic coast. We will be covering Notre Dame at Georgia Tech on Saturday night in Atlanta. If the map at weather.com is correct, the storm will precede the Irish into town and leave well before kickoff, but it may wreak havoc on travel plans for Notre Dame and its many fans.
There's a larger point today, the first anniversary of landfall of Hurricane Katrina. Everyone is much more cognizant of hurricanes and their potential for catastrophe. The devastation Katrina wrought across a wide swath of the Gulf Coast didn't spare college football. That Tulane managed to play out its season at all, even though it did so 330 miles to the north, at Louisiana Tech, is a monument to the will of coach Chris Scelfo, his staff and players.
That LSU managed to win the SEC West despite its campus turning into a recovery center for New Orleans, an hour to the southeast, is remarkable.
"It brought us closer together, helping the victims," Tiger safety LaRon Landry said recently. "We had to overcome adversity. That's one of the main reasons we came together as a team, with one heartbeat. We feel that any obstacle that comes our way this season, we should be able to overcome it."
Hurricane-caused postponements are a recent phenomenon in this sport. Teams have become more cautious about travel, as has society as a whole. The postponements have had an effect on national championships and the postseason. In 1998, for instance, UCLA's game at Miami got pushed back from September to December. The Bruins lost that game on the last weekend of the regular season and lost the opportunity to play for the BCS title in the Fiesta Bowl against Tennessee.
Two seasons ago, California failed to secure a BCS at-large bid, in part because its season-ending 26-16 victory at Southern Mississippi didn't impress the voters. If that game had been played in September as scheduled, then the Bears would have ended the season with a 41-6 victory against Stanford. The Bears may have ended up in the Fiesta Bowl instead of the Holiday Bowl.
If the projected path of Ernesto is correct, games such as William & Mary at Maryland and Akron at Penn State, at the very least, will be played in difficult conditions. It is one more thing that coaches must keep an eye on.
"Oh yeah, every year since I've been here," Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville said Monday. "It's kind of ironic that the first week of the season, you got one coming up the chute."
Ironic and all too real.
