Even if the Hall of Fame had pushed for the game to be played it’s hard to imagine either team giving in.
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Originally, the Indianapolis Colts and Green Bay Packers were supposed to face off for the annual Hall of Fame Game – the league’s initial exhibition matchup that takes place each year after the Hall of Fame enshrinement.
Packers great Brett Favre, who infamously spent a few forgettable seasons playing for the Vikings and the Jets, joked about making yet another return to the playing field, prompting a hilarious reaction from current Packers QB Aaron Rodgers.
Hall of Fame president David Baker said that he was notified about two and a half hours before the scheduled kickoff that there were issues with the paint at midfield and the end zones.
Both Colts and Packers players took the field in shorts around the the time the game would have kicked off as part of an ad hoc fan fest.
It’s like Xmas being delayed because someone plugged in the wrong lights and everything was going to burn down. For the 2016 edition, which was to feature the Green Bay Packers and Indianapolis Colts, the stadium was using the former field from the Superdome in New Orleans for this year’s contest before being torn out for a permanent field to be installed for next year’s contest. But it was still a major screw-up by the National Football League, which should have been able to not only apply paint that would have worked but had some kind of contingency plan in place had something gone wrong.
Baker said the Hall’s class of 2016 would be introduced to the crowd, and the halftime show featuring Lee Greenwood would be held.
Baker said commissioner Roger Goodell was traveling and so he didn’t talk to him, but he said he knew Goodell would agree with the decision. Fans were allowed to enter the stadium after a delay, but were not told about the cancellation of the game until Baker addressed them at 8 p.m, almost 75 minutes after the players were told. A recent Tim McGraw concert and the induction ceremony on Saturday night that put thousands of chairs onto the playing surface come to mind.
As fans filed into Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium Sunday, the countdown to kickoff at 7:00 p.m. was still an hour away.
“A very, very hard decision for us today”, Baker said.
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As the AP points out, Sunday’s game wasn’t the first National Football League exhibition game to be called off. “Yes, we’re upset. We have to make it right to our fans and also get to the bottom of exactly who got this paint job done and why was there incompetence”. We’re going to thoroughly look at what occurred to make this not happen. “It’s not how you got there or why you got there”.
