Stiff Of The Week: The NFL

I am going to preface this post for anyone other than Inky or Greazy that may read this. First let me say that I understand what a disaster it was that hit Texas this past weekend. I realize that thousands are homeless and millions without power. I realize that almost all of down town Houston is covered in glass from the sky scrapers and that it will be weeks before things resemble normal. All that being said the NFL seriously dropped the ball on the Texans, Ravens game that was to be held tonight.

Let's just review some of the terminology that was being used leading up to the storm making landfall on Friday. Words like "largest storm mass ever" and "certain death" were tossed around like "Good Morning" and "How are you". So what about this storm led NFL officials to believe that by postponing the game one day it would somehow go off without a hitch. The fucking roof got blown off the dome for Christ sake. Now both the Ravens and the Texans have lost their bye week which will surely affect both teams later this season.

What the NFL should've done is have both teams report to New Orleans or Atlanta for a worst case scenario game at a neutral site. The city of New Orleans could've benefited from an extra NFL game and the people of Houston should've been glad to give it to them. From a revenue perspective the NFL could've made it up to the Texans, it's not like this kind of thing has never happened. When Katrina hit the Saints played almost the entire season in other stadiums including having a "home game" in the Meadow Lands against the Giants. The Baltimore Sun reported that the reason the venue wasn't changed was because the Houston owner didn't want to lose the game. I'm sorry, if this is the only reason and there was not a chance of playing somewhere else the NFL should've had the fore site to reschedule the game when news of the storm's imminent path were revealed.

As a fan I should probably be happy to have the bye week done in week 2, now I have 15 straight weeks of Ravens football to watch for better or worse. But I know come November when we should've been off someone will be injured that could've used that week to rest and possibly cost us a win later. So for this reason among many many other problems I've had with the NFL in my life (letting our cities records be bastardized in Indy for starters) I deem the NFL my stiff of the week!