Furman game cancelled; Raiders donate meals to those impacted by Florence

HAMILTON, N.Y. » Saturday’s Colgate-Furman football game has been canceled due to the potential effects of Hurricane Florence.

Weather models earlier in the week had Greenville on the very outer edge of the storm, which would have made playing the game manageable. But those models have changed and Colgate-Furman becomes one of many games scheduled for the Carolinas this weekend to be postponed, canceled or relocated.

“The course of the storm looks like it’s taking a bit more of a path to impact our game,” Colgate head coach Dan Hunt said. “At the end of the day, you have to look at the big picture and that’s the safety of everyone involved. And by that I mean the teams and families but also the allotment of resources used for the game that could be better used somewhere else.”

Colgate has released its hotel rooms to those being displaced by the stormand also is donating the scheduled team meals to hotel guests.

“We immediately gave up our hotel rooms so that more rooms are now available to those coming inland,” Hunt said. “But we still bought the meals we were going to have and requested that the hotel serve those meals to the people who have been relocated, on us.

“We were going to have Chick-fil-A delivered to the airplane after the game but have sent instructions that those meals be distributed wherever it could do the most good.”

Colgate’s next game is now Sept. 22 at home against Lafayette.

“It’s obviously a disappointment that we are not playing but at the end of the day, there are decisions bigger than football that need to be made for the safety of a lot of people,” Hunt said. “This is 100 percent the right decision.”