Flight cancellations around bowls lead to unexpected media road trips

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is not just an excellent 1987 John Hughes film with Steve Martin and John Candy, but also an apt description of some of the challenges many media members are facing trying to get to some bowls. The combination of last week’s severe winter storms across much of North America and the fallout for airlines (especially Southwest) around that has screwed up an incredible amount of travel, including for athletes. But it’s also messing up things for many media members who had counted on flying to bowl games post-Christmas, and are now having to find alternate road trip pathways. Here are a few of the many examples of that:

https://twitter.com/AdamSparks/status/1607220779367661568

https://twitter.com/omwhitmireTV/status/1607513852987736065

Those waves of cancellations also impacted conference officials, including Pac-12 executive associate commissioner Merton Hanks:

https://twitter.com/MertonHanks36/status/1607818765550637057

And while it’s not in the media realm, UTEP basketball coach Joe Golding wound up as one of the real heroes here, volunteering to drive three stranded Pitt football players from Dallas to El Paso ahead of the Sun Bowl:

So there’s a lot of unexpected turning to roads here. Hopefully this doesn’t lead to anyone going the wrong way.

We send our best to the many, many media members trying to get to different bowls amidst all this travel chaos.

[Photo of Dec. 26 flight cancellations in Phoenix from The Arizona Republic, via USA Today]