Oklahoma AD rips Ole Miss, SEC; Rebels defend travel effort

Athletic director Roger Denny took aim at the SEC office and Ole Miss in expressing his frustration with Oklahoma‘s game against the Rebels being postponed to Sunday, repeatedly calling it an “inexplicable” situation that “unfairly burdens” the Sooners.

In a statement issued Saturday, the Rebels insisted they did everything they could to travel to Norman, Oklahoma, on Friday night.

The SEC made the decision to move the game from Saturday to Sunday following the Federal Aviation Administration’s nationwide ground stop Friday that disrupted thousands of flights, including those for multiple college football teams.

In an interview with “SoonerScoop” on Saturday morning, Denny claimed Ole Miss made a football decision in preferring to push the game to 1 p.m. ET on Sunday and questioned whether school officials made sufficient efforts to get to Norman in time to play Saturday.

“Like the rest of the nation, we faced unprecedented challenges with Friday’s ground stoppage,” the Ole Miss statement said. “As we worked through the travel issues and uncertainty surrounding the situation in real time, the goal was always to fly to Norman Friday night and play the game Saturday.”

After the FAA ground stop was lifted at 8:30 p.m. ET, Ole Miss officials said they were informed by their charter broker, Air Planning, that JetBlue could not fly the team to Oklahoma on Friday night.

“At that hour, due to the time required to rescreen the party and travel to the Tupelo airport, the crew’s duty time would have expired prior to departure,” the Ole Miss statement said. “There were no other flight options at that point, and we determined it was too late to put our student-athletes on a bus trip of eight or more hours. In addition, the flight crew’s duty time restrictions prevented us from being able to fly out until Saturday afternoon at the earliest.”

The game was originally scheduled for 4:15 p.m. Saturday, and Denny said Oklahoma was “absolutely” open to playing the game Saturday night if possible. He said doing so would have presented some inconveniences but would have been “nowhere near as unfair to our fans” as moving the game to Sunday.

“It’s inexplicable,” Denny said. “I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that they can’t find a way to get here. My concern is the level at which they were pushed to find a way to get here.”

On Friday, the Ole Miss players and staff members boarded buses at the Manning Center in Oxford, Mississippi, to depart for their flights at Tupelo Regional Airport. At 3:54 p.m. ET, six minutes before the buses were supposed to leave, the FAA issued the nationwide ground stop.

The players and staff members got off the buses, and the players were released after Ole Miss officials learned the ground stop would last at least a couple of hours. At 8 p.m. ET, the players returned to the Manning Center for a team meeting. About 30 minutes later, the FAA lifted the ground stop.

Shortly before the ground stop was lifted, JetBlue announced it was canceling the majority of its Friday night flights, except for Europe-bound flights from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and Boston Logan International Airport.

The 559-mile trip on buses would have taken more than eight hours.

“We understand other SEC teams were able to keep their games on Saturday, with those visiting teams having available Friday charters or ability to bus to their game in four hours,” the Ole Miss statement said. “We did not have those advantages. We regret that the game had to be moved to Sunday, but we took every reasonable action in our power to avoid this scenario. The ground stoppage has been an unfortunate ordeal for all of us, and we are grateful that a solution was reached to play our game.”

An Ole Miss official told ESPN on Saturday that the Rebels have also been inconvenienced by the postponement of the game; their traveling party is now staying in five hotels instead of one.

The SEC issued a statement at 1:12 a.m. ET on Saturday that a late-night departure could not be accommodated and that the Rebels’ flight was rescheduled for Saturday afternoon.

Denny said Oklahoma’s administration heard from state highway and police officials “as early as 9 o’clock last night” that Ole Miss was telling them it expected the game to be played Sunday and planned to arrive late Saturday afternoon.

To Denny, that raised questions about Ole Miss’ travel efforts and “how many levers they were trying to pull to actually get here.”

“The fact that we heard that from our highway patrol and not directly from the league office at that time is infuriating to me,” Denny said.

In response to the decision, Denny said in a statement early Saturday morning that SEC commissioner Greg Sankey moved the game to Sunday “over our strong objection” and, after further discussions, informed Oklahoma that “our failure to play on Sunday at the directed time would result in a forfeit.”

“They could have just as easily said, ‘Hey, the game is on at 8 o’clock Saturday night. Ole Miss, show up or you forfeit,'” Denny told SoonerScoop. “They chose not to do that, and that’s the issue that we’re dealing with today.”

Denny said he believes Ole Miss preferred to push the game “to a Sunday morning in the rain” rather than play Saturday night and questioned whether the school would have made the same decision about a shortened week if it weren’t playing FCS Wofford next Saturday.

The AD also scolded the conference for the perception that Ole Miss was given the opportunity to make the call.

“The league can’t let people force that issue,” Denny said. “For too long, we’ve allowed institutions to make decisions and create circumstances that are in their individual best interest but unequivocally against the broader interest of college football and our peers in the conference. The leaders of our industry haven’t stepped in, and this is yet another example of that.”

Denny said Oklahoma coach Brent Venables was “furious” about moving the game to Sunday.

Oklahoma is scheduled to host Texas A&M next Saturday at noon ET. Denny said they hope leaders in the conference office “come to their senses” and push back next week’s kickoff time, calling it a competitive disadvantage.

The Sooners have three other home sporting events — a women’s basketball game against Southern, a volleyball match against Vanderbilt and a wrestling meet against Penn State — scheduled for Sunday. Denny said he does not believe the SEC factored that into its analysis of the conflicts and consequences of moving the game to Sunday.

“It feels to me like there are a hell of a lot of circumstances that they didn’t take into account in that balancing test that they do,” he said.

Oklahoma-Ole Miss was the only FBS game moved to Sunday. Every other Power 4 program whose travel was impacted by the FAA ground stoppage will play Saturday, with six other games being rescheduled to different kickoff times.

Denny is in his first year as Oklahoma’s vice president and director of athletics and was hired in January to take over for longtime AD Joe Castiglione upon his retirement.