THE NEW ORLEANS SLAUGHTER IS ANOTHER PLAGUE THAT SHOULD MOVE A PLAYOFF GAME
Anyone who has been on Bourbon Street, by Canal, knows the horror that engulfs a torn city and can’t imagine Notre Dame and Georgia playing a meaningful contest anytime soon — much less Thursday night
A football game should not be played in New Orleans. Everyone is frightened if you’ve ever spent time on the corner of Canal and Bourbon streets, where people went to party and 15 were reportedly dead in an attack at 3:15 a.m. Wednesday. Who hasn’t downed a hurricane after leaving an oyster house in a rowdy part of America? The dawn of a new year brought too many, including Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, a U.S. citizen and Army veteran from Texas.
He wanted to kill the revelers. With an Islamic State flag in his pickup truck, he drove around a police barricade and into the mobs while brandishing a rifle. This is the slaughter of our drunken nightmares, with terror in the neon haze and guns and pipe bombs inside the driver’s vehicle. How many did Jabbar and possible conspirators want to kill, with two explosives found at the scene?
It was enough to drown out any thoughts of the Allstate Sugar Bowl. It was canceled until Thursday night after teams from Notre Dame and Georgia were fraught while staying in hotels near the massacre. Officials from the broadcast world and the College Football Playoff will try to wedge in the game, but in harsh reality, they cannot ask young men to settle down for a day and hurl around bodies in the Superdome when so many were dead and another 25 were reportedly hospitalized.
Move the game to another city, recalling when Hurricane Katrina left a grisly aftermath in 2005. It is another plight on a place once considered festive and now is ashen. Sports doesn’t want to forget New Orleans, placing the Super Bowl in the same stadium next month. The bedlam has become too much to handle. As a sports columnist, I’ve spent too many days and nights in the city, once describing Pat O’Brien’s as “a home away from home” after hosting radio programs at the bar. I’m not sure I can return to the French Quarter after the Superdome, considered a marvelous act of architecture in the 1970s, underwent yet another security sweep.
“He was hell-bent on creating the carnage and the damage that he did. It was very intentional behavior,” police superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said. “This is not just an act of terrorism. This is evil.”
“Public safety is paramount. All parties agree it’s in the best interest of everybody that we postpone the game for 24 hours,” said Sugar Bowl CEO Jeff Hundley, who still wants to “set up a safe and efficient and fun environment” but should know that isn’t possible.
In the opening hours of 2025, this was another reminder of deadly gunfire. These are the final three weeks of President Biden, who was left to express feelings of “anger and frustration” before saying in a statement: “My heart goes out to the victims and their families who were simply trying to celebrate the holiday. There is no justification for violence of any kind, and we won’t tolerate any attack on any of our nation's communities." The bloodbaths will keep happening.
Sports events must take a pause, of course. I was in Candlestick Park on Oct. 17, 1989, when the stadium shook and postponed a World Series between the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics. The damage wasn’t known until I walked past a Sony Walkman and saw the collapse of the Bay Bridge. Who could watch baseball? In 1963, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle allowed the NFL to play games after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, yet later, he regretted the choice. The 9/11 attacks delayed games. So did the Los Angeles riots of 1992. World Wars canceled sports. So did COVID-19.
How did Georgia coach Kirby Smart tell his players about a student suffering critical injuries? How will Smart and Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman tell players about the death of Tiger Bech, an All-Ivy League kick returner at Princeton from 2017 to 2019? Notre Dame conducted a mass at the Hilton Riverside Hotel and said: “We ask our fans to join us in prayer for those injured and lost in this senseless act of violence.”
They couldn’t play Wednesday night. They can’t play Thursday night. The playoff schedule must sway until both teams arrive in, say, Baton Rouge. ESPN will carry on, as will the Southeastern Conference.
“The decision to postpone tonight's Sugar Bowl was made in the best interest of public safety," SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said. “Lives were tragically lost last night and we are appreciative that public officials and law enforcement agencies continue to work with great diligence to ensure the safety of the New Orleans community.”
What I know is that they can’t play football. It was difficult enough watching two other games in Atlanta and Pasadena. All I could think about was the street corner, across from my media hotel, when life always was good until terrorism arrived.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.