East Carolina canceled its trip to Blacksburg yesterday afternoon, and there are lots of opinions floating around on various aspects of the game, the announcements, etc. I’ll try to talk about some of those topics today.
Perspective: Hurricanes vs. Football
Hurricane Matthew came up the East coast in early October of 2016. Originally a Category 5 hurricane, Matthew was responsible for 47 deaths in the United States, 26 of which occurred in the state of North Carolina.
That hurricane didn’t stop North Carolina from hosting Virginia Tech, or NC State from hosting Notre Dame. At the time, I was surprised that the games were played, because games require emergency first responders to be present. To me, something seems inherently wrong with using a certain percentage of the state’s emergency responders for a couple of football games when people are dying in other parts of the state. Not that that was Virginia Tech’s fault. It wasn’t their home game, and it wasn’t their home state.
I’m probably not the only one who feels that way. I’m guessing that UNC, NC State, and the North Carolina government were all flooded with complaints about the games being played, and I’m guessing that experience caused officials at those schools to err on the side of caution this time around, and there’s a chance they got some pressure from the state government as well. UNC and NC State cancelled their home games on Tuesday, before ECU announced it was not traveling to Blacksburg. That was pretty early for cancellations, consider the forecast could (and did) change a lot.
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In hindsight, despite Tech’s 34-3 win, I don’t think that 2016 VT-UNC game should have been played, nor should the NC State-Notre Dame game have been played. East Carolina also played a football game that day, though it was at South Florida. Hurricane Matthew came right up the coast from Florida to North Carolina, but that didn’t stop ECU from traveling to Florida. In hindsight, that was stupid. People were dying up and down the east coast, and yet the ECU football team was traveling down the coast through that same storm to play a football game. It’s just football. It’s not worth it. Not to mention that the storm delayed their travel back to Greenville after the game. From this USA Today article…
“Hurricane Matthew interfered with East Carolina's trip home after a 38-22 loss to South Florida."East Carolina athletic department spokesman Tom McClellan said that the team's flight after the Saturday afternoon game was diverted to Richmond, Virginia, because the Raleigh-Durham and Pitt-Greenville airports were closed. Buses picked the team up from Richmond, but Interstate 95 was closed once the team crossed the North Carolina border.
"The team spent the night in two separate hotels before making it back to the Greenville, North Carolina, campus Sunday at 12:45 p.m.”
Also, back in 1999 when Hurricane Floyd hit, it devastated the Greenville area. 52 people were killed in the state of North Carolina in that storm, many around the Greenville area. The Tar River reached a record level of 30 feet in Greenville and wiped out large portions of the town. It was a disaster, and it is still on the minds of the survivors from that part of the state.
My point here is that we don’t have the same perspective as North Carolinians when it comes to Hurricanes. However, we should remember Virginia Tech’s traveling issues after the Miami game last year, when Tech had to land in North Carolina to refuel, then fly to Tennessee, and then bus to Blacksburg, where they finally arrived late on Sunday afternoon. That cost them a day of preparation for Georgia Tech, a game which they ended up losing.
Travel can be dicey even when there isn’t a hurricane going on. I can certainly understand ECU’s hesitation when there is a major hurricane brewing. They have experience traveling in the wake of a major hurricane, just two years ago, and it wasn’t pleasant. Not to mention that there’s a decent chance that they were feeling some pressure from their own state government. I can understand why they made the decision they made, and I don’t blame them. It's never wrong to err on the side of caution when people's lives are at risk, even if that risk turns out to be minor.
Botched Announcements
I don’t think we can blame ECU for not playing the game. I can’t even blame them for traveling to Orlando this week. They have no indoor facility, and it’s possible that their practice field might be a swamp for the foreseeable future. If they had stayed in Greenville, they might not be able to practice next week. Sure, they could have come to Blacksburg and then tried to travel to Orlando straight from there, but that involves a lot of unknowns. How many flights, and from where and to where? What are their options by bus? (The article linked earlier in this paragraph says they're traveling by bus.) How many different hotels, and for how many different nights? As I pointed out in the last section, ECU knows from experience what it's like to travel into the wake of a hurricane. By skipping the Tech game and going to Orlando today, ECU’s travel situation over the next week and a half is exceedingly simple. They know where they are going to be, and they know how long they are going to be there.But I do blame ECU for how they handled the announcement. They should have deferred to Virginia Tech and held a token conference call on Wednesday morning. Then they could have laid out everything I laid out in the first section of this article, and told Tech “we can’t in good conscience make the trip, because we don’t want our kids in multiple hotels and taking multiple flights over the next 1.5 weeks. It’s more than just the players, too. We have student trainers, student managers, and key personnel needed to travel to and from the game, and we can’t in good conscience ask them to do this.” I’m sure Tech would have understood.
Instead, ECU simply put out a release on Tuesday afternoon saying that they weren’t making the trip. Apparently, that release took VT completely by surprise. It happened right after Tech’s media session for the day, where a VT spokesman told all of the media assembled that we could expect an announcement about the game on Wednesday. As far as I can tell, that announcement by ECU floored Tech. If you’re going to make that announcement, then you at least have to inform the other party beforehand. If the Pirates did inform Tech, the warning didn’t come very far in advance.
Because of that early announcement, Virginia Tech had to scramble to get out their own announcement and statement, which I don’t believe they handled particularly well, either. Here is an excerpt from it (via Mike Barber of the Richmond Times-Dispatch):
“We will do what’s best for Virginia Tech moving forward as it relates to ECU and to the game,” Tech athletics director Whit Babcock said. “We certainly understand the need for safety, of course, we just felt that tomorrow, making the decision then, would’ve been more responsible and accurate. We informed ECU of this multiple times.”
It's not all that bad, but those two statements weren't received warmly by ECU fans, people in North Carolina in general, or the North Carolina media. The response was predictable. To be honest, it never should have made it through Tech’s Department of Strategic Communications, whose main purpose is to manage communications between the athletic department and the outside world. The department should have recommended that Babcock’s statement read something like this…
“We will do what’s best for Virginia Tech moving forward as it relates to ECU and to the game,” Tech athletics director Whit Babcock said. “We certainly understand the need for safety, of course, and our thoughts and prayers go out to those affected by Hurricane Florence.”