A rare nationwide ground stop upended travelers plans on Friday, causing a potential domino effect for weekend events. While college football fans are worried that their Week 11 games will be interrupted by the plane grounding, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he hopes players can make their engagements on time.
“We’re going to allow for general aviation, those larger movements to take place as a priority. Smaller movements will take a lower priority. And so, if you talk about football teams moving, many of those are on charters, and there’s a lot of individuals on those charter planes,” Duffy said at a Friday evening press briefing. “So I would encourage those football teams to reach out to the FAA to schedule their flight times and make sure they can move to make sure we have games going off tomorrow.”
The college football industry is a significant one, potentially impacting the Saturday television schedule for networks such as ABC, CBS, ESPN, Fox and NBC if the effects of the ground stop can’t be averted. Several football teams across the country were preparing to travel on Friday when the nationwide ground stop was put into effect.
“We are in close communication with our member institutions to assess potential disruptions and coordinate appropriate responses,” the Southeastern Conference’s official account said on X on Friday, before the ground stop lifted. “The safety and well-being of student-athletes, coaches and team personnel remain our highest priority.”
The SEC has since noted that Saturday’s game between Auburn and Mississippi State will move from 12 p.m. ET to 4:15 p.m. ET on Saturday. Though, the game was set to broadcast on ESPN2, a new network has yet to be determined.
This is the first time a hours-long, nationwide ground stop has been issued by the FAA since 9/11, with thousands of flights being delayed, diverted or cancelled on Friday. The ground stop ended up lasting for just over four hours before it was lifted by the FAA.
Duffy attributed the ground stop, which was initially said to simply be caused by a “telecommunication outage,” to old technology during the Friday evening briefing.
“We have old switches, old routers. We use 1980s little copper lines,” Duffy said. “It’s an old system that went down, and went down everywhere. It got overloaded.”
Duffy added that he didn’t “want to rule out that we didn’t have nefarious activity here,” saying that that call fell to Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and the cybersecurity team.
