EWU's Marcus McCurty springs into action after FAA ground stoppage disrupts football team's travel plans: 'I was weirdly calm'
"I was weirdly calm," McCurty said Saturday, after the Eagles traveling football party had all arrived at the Hilton Garden Inn in St.
Key points
- Some college football games were delayed a few hours on Saturday or postponed to Sunday.
- And in Oklahoma at least, there will be perks for fans to make up for the inconvenience, including cheap beers.
- At the Big Sky Conference offices in Farmington, Utah, deputy commissioner Dan Satter was monitoring travel for the five schools headed elsewhere as well as the officiating crews scheduled to each football game.
GEORGE, Utah — Fewer than a dozen people remained in line at Signature Flight Support's security station on Friday when word came to Marcus McCurty that Eastern Washington's chartered plane — and the rest of them at the Spokane International Airport — wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Additional details
- "I remember thinking, 'surely it's going to come to me eventually.' " McCurty wasn't the only person figuring out what to do Friday, when the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights nationwide for nearly five hours.
- Eventually, Montana State, UC Davis and Weber State flew out Friday night, with the ground order causing much less disruption for them than it ultimately did for Eastern.
- A '5-minute' or '5-hour' issue The traveling football party was only a few minutes from taxiing for takeoff when the news came that they wouldn't be able to do so.
- At that point, McCurty, Eastern Washington's director of football operations, started making phone calls.
- As it went on, it became a game of communication, and our schools did a good job of keeping us in the loop." Satter said the league deferred to athletic directors to sort out logistics, specifically kickoff times.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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