Because of extensive flooding in Columbia due to Hurricane Joaquin, Saturday’s LSU-South Carolina game will be moved to Tiger Stadium.
LSU-South Carolina moved from Columbia to Baton Rouge due to flooding
LSU-South Carolina won’t be the first football game to be relocated due to weather
Streeter Lecka/Getty Images
South Carolina-LSU game has been moved to Baton Rouge. Kickoff is TBA on Saturday
— Brett McMurphy (@McMurphyESPN) October 7, 2015 South Carolina had discussions about multiple possible venues and wanted to keep the game in Columbia.
‘We are not 100 percent sure at this time that we will have a game at Williams-Brice,’ athletics director Ray Tanner said Tuesday afternoon.
...‘There have been lots of discussions in the last few hours,’ Tanner said. ‘There are conversations about possibly moving the game to another city. More than one is being talked about it.’
Tanner has spoken with LSU officials about the possibility of playing the game at LSU.
‘Our intentions are to stay on schedule and play here in Columbia, but it’s not a definite,’ he said
The Gamecock fans at Garnet and Black Attack recognize this as the right decision, with Columbia currently unable to safely host the event.
Eighteen dams have failed and eight more are in danger. There are collapsing roads and flooded neighborhoods; we have had too many deaths along with some heroic rescues. It's a nightmare and its not going to be fixed by Saturday - we have a long, grueling haul ahead of us. When you take it all in (and it's hard to do even for the areas of the Palmetto State not as hard hit as the Midlands), the handwriting is on the wall that the game should not proceed at Williams-Brice Stadium. USC fans should embrace that with as much good grace as we can muster. After all, we are South Carolinians first.
South Carolina has canceled classes for the week, and SEC Nation, the SEC Network’s traveling preview show, has changed plans and will head to Knoxville instead.
Games have been cancelled because of lightning before (LSU’s 2015 opener was cancelled) and game time changes happen too (Michigan-Maryland got moved up due to weather this past week), but relocating games is rare.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, LSU was forced to move its home game against Arizona State to Tempe. And The Valley Shook has a great longform piece on the program’s memories of that time. And Tulane played only away games in the 2005 season because of Katrina.
Last season, the Buffalo Bills moved a game against the New York Jets to Detroit due to a snowstorm in Buffalo.
Strangely, collapsed roofs have caused issues for multiple professional teams. The Kingdome’s roof collapse in 1994 forced the Seattle Mariners to move 20 games and the Seattle Seahawks to play three regular season games at Husky Stadium. After the roof at the Metrodome collapsed, the Minnesota Vikings played one home game at the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium and one in Detroit.
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