Oklahoma AD says SEC 'inexplicably' moved Ole Miss to Sunday because of FAA's nationwide ground stoppage
· Yahoo Sports
Oklahoma athletic director Roger Denny is still peeved that the Sooners’ game against Ole Miss was moved to Sunday.
OU was supposed to host Ole Miss on Saturday at 3:15 p.m. Central Time, but the FAA’s nationwide ground stop on Friday afternoon led to Ole Miss not being able to fly to Oklahoma City until Saturday. The SEC postponed the game to Sunday, and Denny issued a statement late Friday night excoriating the decsion to postpone the game.
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In that statement, Denny said the choice to move the game back a day “isn’t fair to our athlete, our institution or to Sooner Nation. But we’ve been given no other choice.”
Saturday, in an interview with On3, Denny said it was inexplicable that the SEC decided the best course of action was to postpone the game to Sunday at Noon CT.
Q: How did we get here, with OU now playing Ole Miss at noon Sunday after Friday’s FAA ground stop?
Denny: Inexplicably, I would say the league office determined after weighing all the circumstances of this that it made more sense for us to move a game and redirect 82,000 fans and get our team ready to go again and get our campus set up to host a game and work with all of our partners in the community to get ready for a game that has the impact that this does. All of that was much easier for them to deal with than asking another team in this league to find a way to travel here from Oxford.
He also added that he did not know if Oklahoma’s relationship with the SEC had been damaged as a result of the game being moved.
Q: Has this hurt OU’s relationship with the SEC?
Denny: I don’t know. They’ll probably send their carnival barker out there to accuse me of pandering again. And candidly, I don’t care. My job and my duty is to our players, our university, and our fan base. If they don’t like the way we handle our business, I just don’t much care about that.
Ole Miss doesn’t have an airport near campus
In its own statement on Friday evening, the SEC said that “a late-night departure could not be accommodated by the charter company with which Ole Miss was contracted.”
Ole Miss does not have the luxury of a short trip to a nearby airport for road games. The school charters jets through JetBlue and flies in and out of Tupelo Regional Airport. The airport is roughly a 50-minute drive from the Ole Miss campus.
The airline does not regularly fly in and out of Tupelo Regional, either. According to public flight tracking records, the plane Ole Miss is taking to Oklahoma City arrived in Tupelo at 1:49 p.m. CT on Friday after taking off at 12:39 p.m. Eastern Time in Fort Lauderdale.
Ole Miss was scheduled to depart Tupelo at approximately 3:30 p.m. CT on Friday afternoon, or less than an hour after the nationwide ground stop was implemented.
The ground stop was lifted at 7:15 p.m. CT. The only aircraft that left Tupelo Regional Friday evening after the ground stop ended was a medical helicopter.
Additionally, the Tupelo Regional Airport’s tower is only staffed from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. And since JetBlue does not operate out of Tupelo Regional, the crew that flew the plane to Tupelo was likely the only crew available to fly the plane to Oklahoma City. The FAA has strict limits on how many hours pilots can be on duty; the 10-hour limits impacted thousands of flights after the ground stop was lifted.