The college football landscape was thrown into disarray Friday, along with the broader air-travel system, after the Federal Aviation Administration imposed a historic nationwide ground stop.
Although the NFL does not have a Saturday schedule, the league still felt the effects of the four-hour flight suspension that disrupted air travel across the country.
As a result, one referee is now set to officiate two games in two separate states.
The NFL announced changes to several officiating assignments after the travel disruptions. Three backup officials will now take part in four Week 10 matchups: Panthers-Saints, Jaguars-Titans, Dolphins-Colts and Steelers-Bengals.
Don Willard will serve as the referee for Sunday afternoon’s game in Indianapolis before working the Sunday night matchup in Cincinnati.
“Due to the ongoing nationwide impact to air travel this weekend, the NFL has adjusted its officiating assignments for Week 10 games, reassigning officials to games within driving distance of their hometowns,” the league said in a statement distributed to multiple media outlets.
“Each of the league’s 17 officiating crews has a backup referee identified, and that individual trains throughout the year to work at the referee position should the need arise.”
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That need arose after a communications failure sent the aviation system into turmoil. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters Friday that aging technology became “overloaded,” contributing to the shutdown.
“The President for the last year has been asking Congress to fully fund a full build of a brand new air traffic control system,” Duffy said. “So we have TDM, telecom, so this is analog telecom. Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they went down and — I shouldn’t say they went down — they started to give us inconsistency in the data, from those, from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down.”
FlightAware reported that 9,165 flights within the United States, arriving in the country or departing from it were canceled.
College football programs rushed to find new ways to reach their games. Auburn and Purdue were among the teams that chose to travel by bus.
The Ole Miss-Oklahoma game was pushed to Sunday afternoon, overlapping with the NFL schedule, after Ole Miss encountered problems arranging a backup travel plan.
The decision angered Oklahoma athletic director Roger Denny.
