STARKVILLE — Nearly a full day after it put the finishing touches on a 77-74 win at Missouri on Saturday, the Mississippi State’s men’s basketball team staggered back into Humphrey Coliseum a little after 3 p.m. Sunday.
The Bulldogs had a story to tell.
Following the victory, the team boarded a plane bound for the Golden Triangle Regional Airport at approximately 7 p.m. Saturday. But neither the plane, an Embraer 145 twin engine, nor the Bulldogs left Missouri that night.
Twenty minutes into a flight that was expected to last a little more than an hour, MSU coach Rick Ray was informed the plane needed to make an emergency landing after one of its two engines failed.
“The flight attendant came back and informed my wife that there was nothing really wrong,” Ray said. “The pilot would let them know if anything was wrong. A couple minutes later she comes back and says, ‘It’s no big deal. We lost an engine. We’re going to have to land.’ ”
With that, the plane carrying MSU’s 12 players, its coaches, and several MSU employees, was diverted to Lambert International Airport in St. Louis to make an emergency landing.
“The pilots did a really good job through landing,” Ray said. “They did a really good job of handling the situation.”
Ray said most of the team “was sleeping, totally unaware of what was going on.”
By Sunday, though, MSU’s players were more than aware of what had
happened. Travis Daniels, a junior guard from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, sent out a Twitter message that read, “Thank God we landed in St. Louis safely” after the ordeal.
But while safe on the ground, MSU’s journey home was just beginning. After arriving in St. Louis just after 8 p.m., the Bulldogs were instructed to wait for another plane, one that was leaving Lexington, Kentucky, to come get the team and finish the trip to Starkville. But high winds kept that plane grounded in Kentucky, which forced MSU to scramble to devise an alternate plan.
With the city’s annual Mardi Gras celebration taking over St. Louis, finding enough hotel rooms to satisfy MSU’s traveling party of more than two dozen proved difficult, so the Bulldogs traveled by bus to Festus, Missouri, a city of a little more than 11,000 in the Southern part of the state.
That’s where the Bulldogs arrived a little after 1 a.m. Sunday. They waited there for a bus to pick them up at 8 a.m. The trip back to Starkville lasted a little more than seven hours, and the Bulldogs walked back into the Humphrey Coliseum during the MSU’s women’s game against Florida, two days after they departed for Missouri.
Follow Dispatch sports writer Brandon Walker on Twitter @BWonStateBeat
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 37 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.