The Ravens lost their bye week.

The citizens of Galveston, Houston and surrounding Texas areas lost a lot more than that.

The devastation of Hurricane Ike, which hammered parts of Texas and Louisiana early Saturday morning, forced commissioner Roger Goodell and the National Football League to postpone this past weekend’s Ravens-Texans game to Nov. 9, robbing the Ravens of their bye week and forcing them to play 15 straight weeks to close the regular season.

The reception of the announcement from the Ravens faithful on fan blogs, message boards, talk radio and elsewhere hasn’t been pleasant. A commenter on The Baltimore Sun’s Ravens Insider blog said the Ravens “are the ones that really get the short of the stick,” not the thousands of families who were evacuated from their homes — some of whom have no home to return to — or, worse yet, the people who lost loved ones in the Category 2 hurricane.

One fan suggested that the Texans should have had to forfeit the game if they didn’t want to play it away from storm-ravaged Reliant Stadium, which hypothetically could be half-filled with the reported 37,000 evacuees seeking shelter.

“It’s just another example of Baltimore getting the shaft from the NFL,” quipped another commenter. If anyone got shafted over the weekend, it was the Chargers. Now those are some fans who have the right to complain.

You can argue that Goodell erred, but his gaffe wasn’t pushing the game back to November. His mistake was made Thursday when he initially moved the game to Monday night. Goodell saw the damage Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans and the Superdome in 2005. He should have assumed the city of Houston would have more important things to worry about than a football game.

Maybe on Thursday night, Goodell could have come up with a better solution, one that would have kept the Ravens’ and Texans’ bye weeks intact. Maybe they could have played at a neutral site Sunday. Maybe they could have played right here in Baltimore. Or maybe the NFL could have shuffled a few team schedules to try to find a suitable solution for all parties.

So Goodell didn’t make the optimal decision for the Ravens, but he did the best he could considering the circumstances.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that these athletes — despite their enviable jobs and their desirable salaries — are people, too. The Texans’ players have families who were uprooted, just as everyone else. Their houses were damaged, just as everyone else. And they were concerned with something greater than a Week 2 matchup with the Ravens, just as everyone else — outside of Baltimore, that is.

“To not have the bye makes it really, really a long year,’’ Texans tight end Mark Bruener said to Sports Illustrated’s Peter King on Saturday night. “But you’d have to see what’s happened here to believe it. … I think if we had been asked to leave town and play a game somewhere else, it’d have been hard to have our minds in the right places, especially for guys who had to leave families behind while we left to play a football game.’’

The Ravens aren’t complaining — at least not publicly — and they’re the ones who play the games. “Our thoughts and prayers are with all of those who have been impacted by this hurricane,” coach John Harbaugh said in a statement Saturday night. “We will adjust. Our focus now turns to preparing for the Browns.”

As fans, that should be your focus, too.

Matt Vensel is a content creator for b. E-mail him at matt@bthesite.com

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