Jackson Jambalaya

 Ole Miss responded to complaints about moving the Oklahoma game to Sunday: 

Like the rest of the nation, we faced unprecedented challenges with Friday’s ground stoppage. 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 stoppage was lifted at 7:30 p.m., we began preparing the team for departure before our charter broker, Air Planning, informed us that JetBlue could not fly us 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. 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.

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. 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.