The first game of the Dave Aranda era at Baylor won’t take place as scheduled. Baylor announced Tuesday that the Louisiana Tech game scheduled for Saturday has been postponed.

“We are incredibly disappointed to announce the postponement of our upcoming football game against Louisiana Tech,” said Baylor Director of Athletics Mack B. Rhoades. “However, in the interest of the health and wellness of our student-athletes, coaches, and staff, we are confident in this unfortunate but necessary course of action. To the Baylor and Louisiana Tech student-athletes and communities, we share in your disappointment and look ahead to resuming play.”

Louisiana Tech Director of Athletics Tommy McClelland said that the program saw an increase in COVID-19 cases after players went home due to Hurricane Laura.

“We are obviously very disappointed that we will not be able to open the season this weekend at Baylor,” McClelland said in the announcement. “However, with the number of recent positive COVID19 results and contact tracing, it is simply not possible. We would be putting our student-athletes at risk.

“It is obvious that the impact of Hurricane Laura in our community a few weeks ago really sparked our significant increase in numbers. With 95 percent of our city losing power for days – even up to a week in many areas – our student-athletes were forced to find places to stay and some even had family from south Louisiana that came northward to stay with them. So many things that we were able to control for the month of August became out of our control, and I think the numbers prove that it took its toll.

“The days leading up to this outbreak, we had a stretch of three weeks with only one positive case. So the protocols we had in place were working prior to Hurricane Laura.”

Baylor-Louisiana Tech is the third game of the Big 12’s planned Week 1 to be postponed. Oklahoma State-Tulsa and TCU-SMU have also been postponed due to COVID-19.