Thanks for the find. I have commented out that so called line and the site went back up working for a few days.
Today, it crashed again with the same error. Examining the error log to narrow down the date of crash - this is what I found. This looks like a bug.
Is there another Joomla forum where I can present this issue?
19-Jan-2017 17:43:46 America/Chicago] PHP Deprecated: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is deprecated, use preg_replace_callback instead in /home4/nbadorg/public_html/modules/bootstrap.php on line 272
[22-Jan-2017 01:45:46 America/Chicago] PHP Deprecated: Automatically populating $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA is deprecated and will be removed in a future version. To avoid this warning set 'always_populate_raw_post_data' to '-1' in php.ini and use the php://input stream instead. in Unknown on line 0
[23-Jan-2017 05:07:14 America/Chicago] PHP Deprecated: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is deprecated, use preg_replace_callback instead in /home4/nbadorg/public_html/modules/bootstrap.php on line 272