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 a physical altercation between players, which prompted the pilot to abandon the flight plan, sources told CBS Sports.
The dust-up involved freshman forward Jahki Howard and senior forward Ja’Heim Hudson, according to sources. Both players were barred from getting on the second flight late Friday night and will remain on campus, missing Auburn’s highly anticipated matchup Saturday night. The No. 11 Tigers play fourth-ranked Houston at the Toyota Center, home of the Houston Rockets.
Howard and Hudson’s status beyond this weekend is unclear. Neither is a starter but both played 15-plus minutes in Auburn’s season-opening 94-43 win over Vermont on Wednesday.
Publicly accessible flight data reveals the plane carrying the team 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 University Regional 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.”
When reached for comment Friday night, an Auburn spokesperson told CBS Sports the school was planning to release a statement, but as of Saturday morning that’s yet to happen.
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; the plane landed after 1 a.m. local time.
The Tigers are scheduled to face the Cougars at 9:30 p.m. ET. The teams are ranked No. 1 (Houston) and No. 2 (Auburn) at KenPom, marking only the ninth time since 2011-12 that the top two KenPom teams have squared off.