With Hurricane Matthew making its way up Florida’s coast, the SEC ultimately decided it best to postpone this weekend’s Florida-LSU game in Gainesville. Because the two teams do not have any overlapping bye weeks the rest of the year, rescheduling the game was expected to be a difficult task. LSU Athletics Director Joe Alleva says it will be “very difficult.”
“No, I think it’s going to be very difficult,” Alleva said in a radio interview. “The scenarios down the road would require some serious changes in schedule.”
There appear to be a few scenarios that could be possible. First would have been to schedule the game for November 19. Florida is scheduled to host Presbyterian while LSU is hosting South Alabama. Offering South Alabama and Presbyterian a nice check would have to be involved in order to reschedule the game for that day (and South Alabama and Presbyterian could just play each other if they wanted), but there could be some misleading information to how feasible that may be.
Alleva ripped a report from Brett McMurphy of ESPN.com stating Florida offered that scenario before being turned down by LSU.
Florida says LSU turned down offer to reschedule game Nov. 19; LSU AD Joe Alleva says he had “no contact w/anyone” about rescheduling game
— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) October 7, 2016
“That’s a flat out lie,” Alleva said in response to that report. “It’s a perfect example of terrible journalism. He didn’t call me, he didn’t call Michael Bonnette. He tweeted out that garbage.”
McMuprhy actually has a pretty solid reputation with his Twitter reporting, but we’ll move on.
Another scenario could be to play the game over conference championship weekend, assuming neither Florida nor LSU are in the SEC championship game of course. The other scenario, which appears to be the likely option, is the game will simply be canceled for good. We’ll see if they can figure this one out, but just a reminder to you all that scheduling in college football is hard!