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The plane carrying the Auburn men’s basketball team to Saturday’s game vs. Houston turned around and returned to the airport after taking off Friday afternoon due to an altercation involving Tiger players which prompted the pilot to abandon the flight plan, sources told CBS Sports. No. 11 Auburn is scheduled to play against No. 4 Houston in a highly anticipated matchup on Saturday night at the Toyota Center in Houston.
Publicly accessible flight data reveals the plane didn’t leave Alabama’s airspace before turning around. On Friday night, a report from the Fox TV affiliate in Birmingham, Alabama, stated Air Traffic Control’s contact with the plane included an on-flight message to ATC that “a bunch of basketball players” were “fighting,” prompting the plane to return to Auburn’s airport.
A subsequent tweet from WBRC’s Jonathan Hardison included the following quote from a pilot on the plane: “Flight deck is secure, the threat level is contained. We just had — we’ll have police on the ground, we had two players that got into a physical altercation, clothes were ripped.”
It’s not known which players were involved and the intensity or nature of the altercation that caused the pilot to make the decision to return the plane back to Auburn University Regional Airport. When reached for comment, an Auburn spokesperson told CBS Sports the school is planning to release a statement on Friday night, but late Friday night that changed to a potential press release from the university being issued Saturday.
Power-conference programs almost always travel on chartered flights these days, and that was the case with the Tigers. Auburn did procure another flight late out of Alabama on Friday night, with the plane scheduled to land in Houston after 1 a.m. local time. Whether or not the flight included everyone on Auburn’s roster wasn’t clear late Friday night.
The Tigers are scheduled to face the Cougars at 9:30 p.m. ET at the Toyota Center.
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