The NFL said on Friday that it is monitoring Hurricane Hilary and the storm’s potential impact on the Los Angeles Chargers’ home preseason game against the New Orleans Saints Sunday evening.
“We continue to monitor the weather and will (update the situation) if anything changes,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy told NOLA.com.
McCarthy did note that there weren’t any current plans to cancel the game altogether. But as with any storm of this magnitude, things can change rapidly.
As of Friday afternoon, Hurricane Hilary was a Category 4 with sustained winds of 130 miles-per-hour and 325 miles off the coast of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Per CNN, it is expected to make landfall as a tropical storm in Southern California some time Sunday evening.
Earlier on Friday, the National Weather Service issued a Tropical Storm Watch for the state of California for the first time ever as Hilary comes barreling in.
As for the Chargers and their home game against New Orleans, it is slated to kick off at 4:30 PM local time. That’s about when the storm is expected to bring 40-mile-per-hour winds and significant flooding to the Southern California region.
Releasing a statement of this ilk is not foreign to the NFL. They have had to cancel, postpone and move games in the recent past due to hurricanes and tropical storms. But with this most-recent storm, the location is new for the league. Typically, teams in Texas, New Orleans, Florida and parts of the east coast have been impacted by storms of this ilk in the past.