The college football world — like everyone else flying — was thrown into chaos after the Federal Aviation Administration’s historic ground stop on Friday.
And while the NFL isn’t playing Saturday, that doesn’t mean the league wasn’t affected by the four-hour stoppage that halted flights across the nation.
One referee will now work two different games in two different states.
The league said that the flight issues have led to some changes in referee assignments, and now three different backup officials will work in four different games — the Panthers-Saints, Jaguars-Titans, Dolphins-Colts and Steelers-Bengals matchups.
Don Willard will actually serve as the referee for the Sunday afternoon game in Indianapolis and the night game 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 NFL said in a statement shared to multiple media outlets.
“… Each of the league’s 17 officiating crews have a backup referee identified, and that individual trains throughout the year to work at the referee position should the need arise.”
The need in this case came after the aviation world was thrown into chaos after a communications issue stemmed from old technology getting “overloaded,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters Friday.
“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.”
In all, 9,165 flights within, into or out of the United States were canceled, according to FlightAware.
College football teams scrambled to make alternative plans, with a few teams, including Auburn and Purdue, opting to take buses to their respective games.
The Ole Miss-Oklahoma matchup was rescheduled to Sunday afternoon — in the middle of the NFL slate — after the Rebels had trouble with their contingency plans.
It drew the ire of Oklahoma athletic director Roger Denny.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: nypost.com
