Dolphins’ opener against Bucs postponed until Week 11
MIAMI » The Miami Dolphins and Tampa Bay Buccaneers will open the season with a hurricane-imposed bye.
Their opener scheduled for Sunday was postponed by the NFL until Nov. 19 because of Hurricane Irma.
“This is bigger than football,” Buccaneers quarterback Jameis Winston said. “I just want everyone to be safe. Football is not important right now.”
Switching the game to Week 11 was possible because that had been a bye week for both teams. NFL officials earlier announced the game would not be played in Miami this week.
The league also decided against playing this weekend at a neutral site, perhaps in Pennsylvania.
“I just don’t think that’s feasible, whether I would have liked that or not,” Bucs coach Dirk Koetter said. “I don’t think you could ask all the people who would have had to travel on both teams to say: ‘Hey, leave your families in the hurricane and let’s go play a game in Pittsburgh.’ I just don’t think that’s feasible.”
Irma is forecast to threaten much of Florida beginning this weekend.
“The No. 1 thing any of us should be thinking about is the safety of everyone involved,” Koetter said. “It’s a natural disaster. Football takes a back seat to all of that.”
Still, the scheduling situation prompted extensive discussions and speculation before the decision. Both teams resisted switching to Nov. 19 because it means playing the entire season without a break.
“To go 16 straight weeks without a break is really tough,” Bucs defensive end Chris Baker said.
“Our guys kind of need that bye week to get healthy and kind of push through the second half of the season,” Dolphins quarterback Jay Cutler said Tuesday. “It’s not an ideal situation not to have a bye.”
Koetter tried to downplay the potential impact of playing 16 weeks in a row.
“This isn’t going to affect us one bit until we get to Week 11,” he said. “If we’re 10-0 or 0-10, we’d be feeling different about ourselves. If we were 100, we’d probably want to keep playing. If we’re 0-10, I probably won’t be standing here.”
Seahawks’ Bennett says he feared death by Vegas police
LAS VEGAS » Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett accused Las Vegas police on Wednesday of racially motivated excessive force, saying he was threatened at gunpoint and handcuffed following a report of gunshots at an after-hours club at a casino-hotel.
Police said they’re investigating, but that Bennett failed to stop for officers searching a crowded casino for what they believed to be an active shooter just hours after the Aug. 26 boxing match between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor.
“I believe this case will become completely clear as all the available video is reviewed for evidentiary purposes,” Clark County Undersheriff Kevin McMahill told reporters. “We’ll see very, very clearly exactly what happened on this incident.”
Bennett said on a Twitter message titled “Dear World,” that police “singled me out and pointed their guns at me for doing nothing more than simply being a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
McMahill aired a lengthy video clip taken from a police sergeant’s body camera during a search of the Cromwell casino after a report of gunfire at the Drai’s nightclub. But he said at least one officer who encountered Bennett didn’t have his body camera on at the time.
Bennett isn’t seen until the very end of the clip — being handcuffed as he lies prone in a traffic lane on Las Vegas Boulevard.
McMahill said that with an internal affairs investigation just beginning, he saw “no evidence that race played any role in this incident.”
Police and casino officials later attributed the report of gunfire to the sharp sound of velvet rope stands being knocked to a tile floor.
Bennett, during a brief appearance Wednesday at the Seahawks’ practice facility in Renton, Washington, described the incident as “traumatic” but declined to go into specifics about it.