Many have asked -- why wasn't the Florida-Idaho game played on Sunday? -- here is your answer
Tuesday, September 2, 2014 | Football, Scott Carter
Florida captains Max Garcia, Chaz Green, Michael Taylor and Jabari Gorman (l to r) on Saturday.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – As soon as the Florida-Idaho game was suspended late Saturday night at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, a common question was repeated over and over.
My timeline on Twitter has flickered constantly with the query:
@GatorZoneScott RT Scott why didn't they reschedule game for Sunday @ 12:00?
— Courtney Russin (@courtney_russin) September 2, 2014
@GatorZoneScott why is tomorrow apparently not an option?
— Ben Kizer (@thebenkizer) August 31, 2014
@GatorZoneScott why can't they just play tomorrow?
— Brody Meyers (@xXGatorChompXx) August 31, 2014
On the surface, sure, it seems like a simple enough solution. Tell both teams to go home, sleep a few hours, and come back in the morning and we'll do this all over again.
Folks, it's not that simple. Not even close.
College football teams plan their travel to road games months in advance.
They book hotel rooms, charter flights, arrange meeting rooms, meal services and all sorts of logistics way before they ever take off from home. Every move is scripted.
Teams generally arrive at their destination on Friday afternoon or early evening. The semi-trucks that carry the team's gear and equipment usually leave a day or two in advance depending on how far the trip.
Once they arrive, the players usually gather in a meeting room at the hotel for dinner and then off to meetings with their position groups.
After that, they go down for the night with a curfew in place. And they repeat the meal-and-meeting process the next morning until it's time to leave for the stadium. If it's a night game, they get some extra rest until departing for the game.
When something interrupts the schedule such as a severe thunderstorm that decides to hang around the stadium for a few hours with more than 1,100 lightning strikes in a six-hour window, well, the best laid-out plans go kaput.
Take Saturday for example. Idaho checked out of its hotel prior to leaving for The Swamp. By the time officials made the call to suspend the game several hours later, the Vandals' chartered plane was already on the tarmac at Gainesville Regional Airport for the scheduled 2,700-mile flight home to Moscow, Idaho.
Meanwhile, here are just some of the organizations that staff each UF home football game. These organizations budget resources in their annual planning to meet fiscal, manpower and other requirements on game days.
--The Alachua County Sheriff's Office
--The University of Florida Police Department
--The Gainesville Police Department
--The Alachua County Fire and Rescue Department
--The Florida Department of Health in Alachua County
--Multiple federal law enforcement agencies
In figures provided by the UAA, it takes an average of nearly 3,000 people to stage a UF home game.
A look at those figures according to the service provided: concession workers (1,300), private security (400), law enforcement (285), game operations (300), credentialed media and media staffing (300), cleaning crew (200), medical personnel (100) and caterers (100).
While far removed from the bright lights of the field, they are the ones who work to make the game-day experience possible.
By the time I left the stadium around 1 a.m. Sunday morning, cleaning crews still had tons of garbage to remove, work that would not be completed until Sunday afternoon.
In addition, stadium workers such as concession stand attendants, ticket takers and others would need to be available on short notice Sunday, basically an impossible task to arrange in such a short turnaround.
As you can see by the general game-day services listed above, there was no way such a massive undertaking could have been arranged for a Sunday game.
In fact, by the time most of the fans at the game woke up Sunday morning, the Vandals had already arrived back home, exhausted from their cross-country trip and unusual visit to the Sunshine State.
So, while the question “Why can't they play on Sunday?” seemed a reasonable thought immediately after the news broke, now you know why that was never a possibility.
Too many moving parts. Too many people involved. Not nearly enough time.
