FAA ground stop disrupting travel for 10 Power 4 college football teams

The travel plans for multiple Power 4 conference football teams have been disrupted by the Federal Aviation Administration's nationwide ground stop of all flights on Friday because of communications problems at regional air traffic control centers.

Four Big 12 teams (Baylor, Kansas State, Utah and Arizona State), three teams from the SEC (Ole Miss, Tennessee and Texas) and two from both the Big Ten (Minnesota and Washington) were still waiting to leave on Friday for the sites of this weekend's games.

Arizona State has de-planed, will head home to rest and is planning to fly to Orlando on Saturday morning to play UCF in a game scheduled for 3:30 p.m. ET, sources told ESPN.

The ACC told ESPN that all of its visiting teams had reached destinations of Saturday's games before the FAA issued the ground stop of all flights.

ESPN has also confirmed that Oregon State, which is scheduled to play at No. 24 Boise State on Saturday (6 p.m. ET), still hasn't left for Idaho. Another team from the Group of 6 conferences, Wyoming, was also on a flight that was grounded.

The travel delays might affect several of Saturday's top games, including No. 8 Tennessee at Texas A&M (3 p.m. ET), No. 6 Texas at No. 21 LSU (7:30 p.m. ET), and No. 2 Utah at No. 23 Arizona (7:30 p.m. ET).

Purdue was scheduled to fly to Iowa City to play the No. 15 Hawkeyes, but they instead opted to take buses after their flight was delayed, sources told ESPN.

Auburn is taking buses to Mississippi State after its flight to Starkville, Mississippi, was delayed. North Texas is doing the same for its game against UTSA in San Antonio.

Georgia coach Kirby Smart told "The Paul Finebaum Show" that his team had assistant coaches on the road recruiting Friday, and the No. 1 Bulldogs need to get them back for a home game against No. 22 Missouri (3:30 p.m. ET). The Tigers have already arrived in Athens, Georgia.

"The text thread is popping," Smart said. "We're wondering how the officials are going to get to where they got to get to go and the teams, some of them are grounded and not to their locations yet. Maybe if we actually had regional conferences, we could just drive to the games."

Another issue to track here will be officials. They tend to fly in the day before, and there could be a scramble for officials or crews compromised by travel.

A Big Ten spokesman told ESPN that all of the league's officials for the eight games on Saturday are already on site. Another source told ESPN that some officials scheduled to work ACC games are grounded, but the league can go with officiating crews of seven, if necessary.

The FAA issued the ground stop because of "extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety," according to a notice.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said a telecommunications outage was affecting the regional air traffic control centers that direct planes between airports nationwide. He said FAA technicians are investigating. This is the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023 when a key FAA computer system malfunctioned. Before that the last time had been after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Homeland Security secretary said there was no indication yet of nefarious acts behind the FAA communications issue.

ESPN's Adam Rittenberg, Andrea Adelson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.