Wake Forest Athletics
100% Cotten: Hurricane Miami
10/21/2005 12:00:00 AM | Football
Oct. 21, 2005
I'll be honest with you - the name Wilma doesn't exactly strike fear into most folks. The first thing I think about is Fred Flintstone's wife. But when Wilma became the strongest Category 5 hurricane on record recently during a short portion of her lifespan, the world took notice.
And so did college football.
Georgia Tech and Miami were set to square off at the Orange Bowl on Saturday, October 22. But when storm trackers and forecasters set the same date as an approximate time for Wilma to hit landfall in south Florida - Floridians, college football administrators and television networks began to scramble to, more than anything, insure human safety but also insure the integrity of the ACC football schedule if they could.
As the schedules would have it, both Tech and Miami had open dates on November 19. But the two needed some help to get there. And it would come from Wake Forest.
The Deacons' schedule had Miami set to come to Groves Stadium and face off with the Deacs in front of a national ESPN television audience on Thursday night, November 17. Now Miami is good, but not that good. Of course the Hurricanes could not face Wake Forest on the 17th and turn around in 48 hours and play Georgia Tech on the 19th. Wake Forest did not have a game on the schedule for the 12th. And neither did Miami. Problem solved. Wake Forest and Miami would move their scheduled game up five days and meet between the bricks in Winston-Salem on November 12 - thus ending Wake's regular season a full two weeks earlier than last season.
Coach Jim Grobe seemed unfazed by the development, saying he had "no problem at all" with how things turned out. What this will help the Deacons do is stay on schedule with regard to preparing for the storm. Even though an open date between Georgia Tech and Miami on the original schedule would have given the Deacs twelve days to prepare for Hurricane Miami, the schedule would have been different than any since the first part of the season when playing Vanderbilt on a Thursday and then having nine days to get ready for Nebraska. If I've learned anything over the years it's that coaches and players are creatures of habit. They pretty much have to be. And now with the Deacs and Canes set to go on a Saturday rather than on a Thursday - Wednesday can still be Wednesday and not Friday. Make sense?
Did someone mention scheduling? We had been preparing for weeks at ISP how to adequately cover both the Wake Forest football game with Miami and what we were counting on as a given - Skip Prosser's Deacs advancing to New York for Coaches vs. Cancer games on November 17 and 18. The then-scheduled football game could have easily been up against the basketball Deacs at the same time. I can't be in two places at the same time, and missing a Deacon basketball game was not a situation I was looking forward to. Now I can hopefully revisit the Marty Glickman Memorial Broadcast Booth at Madison Square Garden and reclaim the umbrella I left there in haste last season when Dr. David Martin and I scurried down from The Garden to Penn Station after the Deacs beat Arizona to catch a train to Maryland where Wake would face the Terps in football the next day in College Station at noon.
I've told a lot of people that umbrella is probably still there. I think I'm going to get to find out.
Too bad it'll be after the Hurricanes hit.
