Last week I was wondering aloud how something like this hasn't happened in the SEC yet, and a fellow SBN editor replied, "No one here ever says class shouldn't be cancelled."
We do have our priorities in order down thisaway. And now, for the first time in over a half-century, Alabama's got a home stand on a weekday, and they're putting a kibosh on all academic activities, because if there's one thing people will flock in droves to see, it's the defending national champs playing Georgia State, a team in their first year of fielding a football program.
“It is not logistically possible for the campus to continue to operate in a ‘business as usual' manner,” said Provost Judy Bonner in an e-mail response to questions. “We must operate as if it were a game-day Saturday.”
To make up for the lost day, administrators shortened fall break. Instead of having Thursday and Friday off the last week of October, classes will be held Thursday, Oct. 28.
True, the traffic patterns all but dictate this has to happen; Bama's campus is impassable enough with a game day throng without adding regular University crowds, but let's not kid ourselves any more than we absolutely have to: This is going to be a barn-burner, by which I mean Georgia State's entire team will be stuffed into a barn and set on fire. (Bill Curry, they'll maybe let live, for old times -- naaah, who'm I kidding.) And that kind of conflagration necessitates a whooole lot of wiggle room.