Major flooding that has caused at least eight deaths, destroyed more than 1,500 houses and forced nearly 12,000 people to evacuate their homes in Colorado is not expected to impact the UNI football team this weekend. The Panthers are scheduled to play at Northern Colorado on Saturday. UNI Coach Mark Farley says he’s monitoring the conditions in Colorado and doesn’t anticipate any issues with travel or the game.
Saturday’s game is scheduled to be played in Greeley, one of the cities impacted by wide-spread flooding that’s spread across 17 Colorado counties. The flooding forced school officials to cancel classes at the University of Northern Colorado’s main campus on Monday, but the campus has reopened today. A state of emergency remains in effect for the region and more thunderstorms are expected over the next 24-hours, which could worsen the disaster.
Farley says an decision to postpone or cancel the game will be made by officials at Northern Colorado. “It will kind of be dictated by them more than by us, we’re going,” Farley says. He says he had not heard about their classes being canceled, but says he will get ready and move on from there.
Farley says UNI could be playing the Bears on a sloppy surface as they have a grass field and if it is very wet than it could be messy. He says the field didn’t look bad in the video of their first game, but things could have changed since then.
Saturday’s game is scheduled to kick-off at 2:30 p.m. Iowa time. 7th-ranked UNI is 2-0 and is coming off a bye week. Northern Colorado is 1-2.
(Reporting by Elwin Huffman, KOEL, Olwein)