FAA Ground Stop Puts College Football, Basketball Travel Plans In Limbo

The Federal Aviation Administration’s decision to ground all flights nationwide for more than four hours Friday sent college and professional sports teams scrambling as they traveled to games over the weekend.

The FAA cited communication problems at regional air traffic control centers, saying the ground stop was imposed “due to extraordinary circumstances and reasons for safety,” The Associated Press reported. The announcement came at around 4:15 p.m. Eastern time on what is typically a busy travel day for college football teams, which customarily fly on Fridays ahead of their Saturday games.

By roughly 8:30 p.m. ET Friday —about 4 hours and 15 minutes after declaring the stop — the FAA lifted the ground stop, allowing flights to resume. But how quickly those grounded teams could mobilize and get into the air remained unclear Friday night.

College, pro teams facing widespread travel issues

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Friday night that the agency would give higher priority to general aviation and lower priority to “smaller movements” such as charter aircraft. Directly addressing the sports travel issue, he added that “if you’re talking about football teams moving, many of those are charters, and there’s a lot of individuals on those charter planes, so I would encourage those football teams to reach out to the FAA to schedule those flight times, so they can move and make sure we have games going off tomorrow.”

While many college teams made it to their destinations Friday, media reports and social media posts indicated several teams were dealing with travel issues. The Athletic reported that more than a dozen programs — including No. 2 Utah, No. 6 Texas and No. 8 Tennessee — were affected as of late Friday afternoon. Utah is scheduled to play at Arizona, Texas is playing at LSU in a game with massive College Football Playoff implications and Tennessee is taking on Texas A&M.

The Big 12 is “evaluating potential changes to Saturday’s football schedule,” it said in a statement to Yahoo Sports. One option could involve swapping time slots with other games, the outlet reported.

The travel issues were wide-ranging. Washington’s football team was sitting in buses awaiting its flight to Michigan State, Fox 13 Seattle reported. Colorado State’s team was grounded ahead of its trip to Washington State, according to The Coloradan. Kansas State, scheduled to play at TCU, also had yet to depart as of Friday afternoon, The Topeka Capital-Journal reported. UNLV was unable to board its charter flight to its game against New Mexico, News 3 in Las Vegas reported.

Mississippi was grounded ahead of its trip to Oklahoma and was expected to meet at its facility at 8 p.m. ET, according to On3. With Auburn’s flight to Mississippi State grounded, the Tigers were instead busing to Starkville, On3 reported.

Five NBA teams were scheduled to fly Friday for Saturday games, the AP reported. The Brooklyn Nets’ flight to Memphis was halted Friday in New Orleans, where they had played the Pelicans earlier in the week. Other teams including the Cleveland Cavaliers, Chicago Bulls and Memphis Grizzlies were due to fly Friday night after playing that evening, the AP reported.

In women’s basketball, No. 3 Southern California had not left as of Friday afternoon for its game Sunday against top-ranked South Carolina in Greenville, S.C., Trojans coach Lindsay Gottlieb told The Athletic.