Games, teams leave Houston for elsewhere

Hurricane Harvey has prompted the Houston Astros and Texans to play home games away from the floodstricken city.

The Astros will play a threegame series against the Texas Rangers at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida, starting Tuesday, and the Texans will play an exhibition game against the Dallas Cowboys at AT&T Stadium in Arlington instead of NRG Stadium.

The Astros, who lead the American League West, head to Florida, where they will have “home” games away from home, just as they did after Hurricane Ike in 2008 when they played two scheduled home games in Milwaukee. The team also said a three-game series against the New York Mets that begins Friday might also be played at Tropicana Field, the home of the Tampa Bay Rays.

Rangers general manager Jon Daniels said the team was open to hosting the series in Arlington this week but had no interest in swapping a series against the Astros later in the season to accommodate the change.

“Just the competitive challenge of having our guys’ last road trip of the year, (a) fourcity trip was not something that we wanted to do,” he said. “We were prepared, we offered to host the series, but the decision was made to go to Tampa instead.”

In college football, No. 13 LSU was supposed to play BYU at NRG Stadium on Saturday. That game has been moved to the Superdome in New Orleans.

Rice’s football team relocated from Houston to TCU’s campus in Fort Worth on a bye week. The Owls opened the season over the weekend in Australia, where they lost to Stanford. The University of Houston’s team is in Austin, home of the University of Texas, preparing for a game Saturday in San Antonio.