I woke up this morning, took a look out my window and saw something I haven't seen much of over the past 72 hours - the sky. Like many in the Tri-State area, I spent the last few days holed up at home, bracing for Hurricane Sandy's impact and going borderline stir crazy. That being said, I was extremely lucky - we didn't lose power even once throughout the storm, so I was able to keep tabs on what was happening in other areas of the country and pass the time by watching TV and going on the internet. In between local news updates I would periodically flip to ESPN for sports scores and highlights, but I realized that very little was going on in the sports world on Monday and Tuesday. Given the havoc that Hurricane Sandy could have wreaked on the professional and collegiate sports world, it's very fortunate that the MLB, NBA, NFL and NCAA all emerged relatively unscathed.
First off, the fact that the hurricane hit on Monday was extremely fortunate. Had Sandy reached the coast on Saturday or Sunday, dozens of college football games and a handful of big NFL games would have been negatively impacted. Given football scheduling, these games would have been very difficult to postpone or reschedule - what would the Dolphins and Jets have done if they couldn't have played at MetLife Stadium on Sunday? How would the undefeated Falcons have been affected if they couldn't get through their battle with the Eagles in Philadelphia? The NFL also dodged a bullet by scheduling Monday Night Football on the west coast - the weather was obviously fine in Arizona this week, and the 49ers had no problem flying in from northern California. What could have been a football scheduling nightmare turned into a non-event for the NFL and NCAA.
One of the few silver linings in what was one of the least competitive - and likely to be least memorable - World Series in recent memory was the fact that no games were impacted by Sandy. If MLB had gotten its pre-World Series wish, we would have seen the Yankees playing in a seven-game Fall Classic. In retrospect, however, that scenario would have been a complete disaster. Check out the video of "Citi Field Lake," below, and you get an idea of what the playing conditions would have been like on the east coast. What if MLB had consecutive World Series games postponed because of the weather? Game Five of the World Series was scheduled for Monday, with Tuesday supposed to be a travel day back to the National League City. Had an East Coast American League team like Baltimore or New York made the series (instead of the Tigers), we'd still be waiting for the Fall Classic to resume.
Indoor sports could have been impacted by Sandy, too, but the NBA schedule also worked out perfectly. The hurricane arrived a full day before the start of the 2012 basketball season, and the Tuesday games were all played outside of the storm's impact radius (in Cleveland, in Miami and in Los Angeles). With the much anticipated Brooklyn Nets home opener against the New York Knicks scheduled for Thursday night, the NBA gives itself a chance to get the Barclays Center up and running prior to tomorrow evening and keep the early season schedule intact. As of now, it seems like the next wave of home openers will be played as scheduled on Wednesday. While Hurricane Sandy unleashed a lot of devastation on parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the sports world was very fortunate.
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