The Federal Aviation Administration paused all flights across the nation on Friday “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety,” and because of communication problems, the reported. This obviously impacts people across the country, and for sports purposes, the paused flights create an issue with Saturday's college football games. Quite a few college teams hadn't taken off for their Saturday games as of Friday evening.
All flights are grounded until at least 11 p.m. ET, and most of the flights wouldn't take off after that anyway. This caused those teams to scramble to find a solution, whether that be to travel by bus or fly out Saturday morning.
Sports' Ross Dellenger reported on Friday that the start times of some of Saturday's games could be changed, too, based on how those teams find alternative transportation. "Conference officials are in dialogue with media partners about adjusting kickoff times of impacted games, potentially swapping time slots with other games," Dellenger tweeted. "Several teams have returned to campus as airport staff informed administrators that the grounding could last 8 more hours." According to On3, 14 teams are still grounded.
The teams with early start times include Tennessee heading to Texas A&M for 3 p.m. ET start, Tulane heading to Rice for 2 p.m. ET start and Kansas State heading to TCU for 2 p.m.
The rest of the teams grounded have 3:30 p.m. ET start times or later, so would have more time to get to their destination in the morning, even if it's not ideal. Tennessee is the only one of these three matchups set for a nationwide broadcast on ESPN.
The games on ESPN surrounding this matchup are not currently impacted by the FAA grounding, so it's unclear what the network will do in terms of moving around broadcast times. There are only two other college football games scheduled at 3 p.m. ET on Saturday—New Mexico State at Missouri State and Florida International at Delaware.
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