FAA: Nationwide ground stop lifted as SEC, college football teams scramble to play Week 11 games
Published:
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced on Friday night that the nationwide ground stop that brought air traffic across the country to a halt for multiple hours on Friday night has now been lifted.
With the ground stop lifted, what does that mean for the 8 SEC football games that are scheduled for a stacked Week 11 of the 2026 college football season?
That is the big question now that as the 8 SEC teams scheduled to play on the road on Saturday as well as multiple other teams in other conferences across the country scramble to get to their destinations on time for Saturday’s games.
According to a report earlier on Friday, Tennessee as well as Texas and Ole Miss had been grounded in their attempts to get to their road games on Saturday.
The SEC released a statement on the FAA ground stop that was put into effect earlier on Friday and put all of those Friday travel plans amid the SEC into disarray.
Now comes the attempted recovery from that ground stop and those road teams trying to find a way to their Saturday games, whether still by air or by bus, such as what Auburn reportedly chose to do earlier Friday in its attempt to get to Saturday’s game at Mississippi State that was set to start at noon ET on Saturday.
The stoppage of the ground stop was the first domino to fall in the solution to Saturday’s potential problems, and now will come the reaction by those SEC road teams and all of the other teams who are trying to get to their road games for Week 11.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
