U.S. Sports Scramble Back To Normal After FAA Ground Stop Upends Team Travel

Detailed summary

Sporting events across the country are slowly returning to normal after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all flights nationwide for several hours.

Major sporting events slowly returned to normal Saturday after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all flights nationwide for several hours a day earlier, disrupting travel plans for professional and college teams across the country.

Most college football teams playing Saturday travel the day before kickoff, and a number of games were delayed by hours to give visiting programs more time to arrive and prepare. No. 2 Utah’s game at No. 22 Arizona was pushed back three hours, as was Arizona State’s game at Central Florida. Other teams, like Auburn, opted for charter buses. One way or another, most teams found a solution.

There was, of course, one major exception: the No. 19 Mississippi game at Oklahoma will now compete with the NFL with a kickoff scheduled for 1 p.m. EST on Sunday.

And in the NBA, the Cleveland Cavaliers got home in time to play their game against the Dallas Mavericks on Saturday night. But they sat most of their starters, a night after Cavs star Donovan Mitchell suggested the Cleveland-Dallas game should be postponed.

JuJu Watkins and her third-ranked Southern California teammates had just boarded their flight to face top-ranked South Carolina when the ground stop was issued. The Trojans women’s basketball team stayed in Los Angeles for the night after being deplaned, and their departure for Greenville was pushed to Saturday afternoon.

Fairleigh Dickinson women’s basketball coach Stephanie Gaitley found out late Friday night that her team’s flight to Ohio State had been canceled. There was discussion about leaving immediately by bus and making a stop halfway, but Gaitley preferred to let her team get a better night’s sleep before setting out on a 10-hour bus ride on Saturday morning.

In women’s soccer, the Utah Royals already were in the Washington, D.C., area ahead of their National Women’s Soccer League semifinal against the Washington Spirit on Saturday.

The Current told ESPN they were “collaborating with key stakeholders, including the NWSL and…

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