Once again, the sound of football whistles and clattering shoulder pads has been replaced. Instead, we hear the sounds of generators and chainsaws.
It’s football season, game week for LSU and Southern, Tulane and SLU, Nicholls State and dozens of high schools across south Louisiana. But it’s also hurricane recovery season, in something that seems like it’s becoming an uncomfortably familiar refrain. For some reason, with storms like Katrina and Isaac and now Ida crossing our shores on Aug. 29, that date is infamously becoming Hurricane Day around here.
LSU evacuated to Houston. Tulane is in Birmingham, Alabama. The Saints are in Arlington, Texas, and no telling when they will return. How will they prepare, learn, practice and, perhaps just as importantly, get proper rest? And how will the ones from the storm-ravaged quarter of the state cope with their concerns about home and kin, all while trying to digest this week’s game plan?
To say it’s a less-than-ideal situation is like saying southeast Louisiana is having a little trouble getting the lights to come on.
There are, to be clear, bigger issues than how well Louisiana’s teams will come firing out of the gate in their season openers this week. We suddenly care less about how crisply someone’s slot receiver will break off an out route, or how efficiently somebody’s linebacker can bring down an opposing ball carrier and force a punt.
But by Saturday, when debris will start to pile up, and tarps will start to stretch across roofs, and generators are humming, and folks are trying to piece their lives back together, a lot of them are going to do their level best to find a taste of normal in this even-more-abnormal time.
They are going to want to hook up a TV to said generator or click batteries into a portable radio and get the first glimpse of a much-anticipated season.
The pride of Louisiana is, to a considerable degree, enmeshed in its football. It will matter, and how Louisiana’s teams play will give folks a lift — or get their blood boiling.
The goal of winning a football game remains unchanged, the beachhead to be reached and conquered, every time. Unfortunately, accomplishing that task is now a lot more complicated for teams that call this fractured part of the world home.
Drilling down on LSU: The Tigers left Baton Rouge by bus Saturday night bound for Houston, where they didn’t arrive until early Sunday morning. As someone who was driving back east to Baton Rouge along Interstate 10 from Texas on Saturday, that comes as no surprise. There was a thick stream of westbound evacuation traffic from the east side of Houston to the east side of the Atchafalaya Basin.
Now the Tigers are encamped in Houston, set to resume their preparations for Saturday’s game at UCLA (7:30 p.m. CDT, Fox) at the Houston Texans’ facility. Early word is LSU may stay there until leaving for Los Angeles on Thursday.
Flying to the West Coast on Thursday has long been coach Ed Orgeron’s plan to better help his players’ finely tuned physiques adjust to the long flight and the double time zone change. The fact they may be doing it from Houston instead of Baton Rouge isn’t a huge wrinkle, but just yet another one heaped on top of the pile that threatens to become too large to manage.
No matter how small a change, it’s hardly what you want. Especially going into a season already fraught with numerous question marks all over the board that will determine whether a talented LSU team is a College Football Playoff contender or a middle-of-the-pack unit.
If this was the plan all along, like a season-starting instead of season-ending bowl trip, it might be different for the Tigers. But these last-minute wrinkles are never welcomed — especially when coaches spend so much time and effort trying to smooth the wrinkles away before they morph into major distractions.
The UCLA Bruins are sitting at home in SoCal, maybe rationing irrigation of their practice fields and worrying about wildfires. But they are otherwise comfortably into their second week mode after throttling Hawaii 44-10 last Saturday at the Rose Bowl.
At this point, it’s advantage UCLA. It’s another factor for the Tigers, who were already going to be strangers venturing into a strange line, to overcome.