It’s not insensitive to talk about football while the floodwaters recede from the Baton Rouge area. Tiger Stadium is the cathedral of college football, and in times of despair people seek to bask in the comfort of a higher power.
On a good day in Louisiana, all there is to worry about is coastal erosion to the tune of around a football field of land every hour. The bad days range from calamitous to cataclysmic. Be it the Deepwater Horizon oil spill or Hurricane Katrina, both human frailty and and natural turmoil seem to have it out for Louisiana.
My guess is that’s because her people can take it; the state flag depicts a pelican wounding herself to feed her hatchlings with her own flesh and blood.
We defied Hurricane Gustav in 2008 by roasting in the midday sun at perhaps the only day game in Death Valley not caused by CBS and JP Sports.
We warmly welcomed Virginia Tech in 2007 as they struggled to find normalcy after the shooting on their campus. We hosted a “home game” for South Carolina last year as they struggled with their own flooding issues. We gave them hospitality. We gave them respect.
Then we kicked both of their asses.
We played Monday Night Football versus Tennessee in September, 2005, not because of Katrina, but Hurricane Rita — remember her? People in Lake Charles and Lake Arthur do. That game also happens to perfectly encapsulate the Les Miles era, which is itself profoundly Louisianan: triumphant, validating, defiant; devastatingly heartbreaking.
Sometimes the river floods and people find themselves in houses with no sheetrock, stuck at their camp, at somebody else’s house, in a hotel, or maybe in one of those white trailers. One day, eventually, the winds will blow in from the Gulf and bring pain and destruction again. But I have good news for you:
It never rains in Tiger Stadium.