Birds-Vikes postponement not decided by bunch of flakes

DON SMOLENSKI'S holidays got complicated about 6:45 Christmas morning.

"I took my dog for a walk. I came back and I had an e-mail from [team president] Joe Banner saying that the storm had flipped," Smolenski, the Eagles' chief operating officer, said yesterday from the snow-blasted NovaCare Complex.

Smolenski, who was visiting family in Connecticut at Christmas, said he took a few hours to open presents with his wife and two sons, then got back together with Banner to start discussing the implications of yesterday's severe winter storm on the scheduled Eagles-Vikings game. At first, on Smolenski's end, the discussions were about the logistics of handling the snow, how many shifts of workers to deploy, and so forth. But sometime late Saturday night, he said, after the Smolenski family hurriedly returned home, the idea of postponement started to be discussed.

There was a lot more discussing after that. "We said, 'Let's reconvene in the morning.' When weather models change, they can change quickly . . . The NFL doesn't postpone games very often," Smolenski said, although the Vikings might beg to differ, having ended up in Detroit for a home game against the Giants 2 weeks ago when snow caused their Metrodome roof to collapse.

The decision was made shortly after noon, before there was any snow on the ground in South Philadelphia - postponement from last night until tomorrow night at 8, a decision that surprised many players and fans. The list of previous NFL postponements includes notations about things like hurricanes, earthquakes and terrorist attacks, along with the odd World Series stadium conflict. The list doesn't contain any games that were postponed because it was going to snow.