MLB Fans Could Have Avoided Shohei Ohtani Plane Tracking Circus By Asking College Football Fans For Help

It was a shame to see Major League Baseball fans salivating on social media Friday afternoon thinking Shohei Ohtani was on a flight for Toronto. It's okay MLB fans, we'll give you a pass on this one, but if you wanted the job done, all you had to do was ask college football fans.

The job of flight tracking is an annual tradition in the college football world, with every coaching search bringing out better trackers than NORAD. If you want to find out who a college athletic director is potentially interviewing for a head coaching position, follow that school's fanbase on social media.

Simply put, turning off the flight tracker isn't a problem.

This is something Major League Baseball fans have yet to learn; the experts are at the college level. We're not talking about some guy who will just type in some tail numbers into FlightAware. I'm talking about fans who will park outside an airport for two days just to see who's on the school's private jet.

This is a craft that can only be taught through years of experience, or a pilot who just happens to be part of a rabid fanbase.

There are coaches who will go to great lengths to not be tied to a job opening. One of the most important rules of flight-tracking is searching for airports within an hour or two driving distance from their home. This gets a little tricky when a potential head coach is out recruiting, usually meeting in an airport terminal in plain site.

Are ADs Flying Commercial Or Private To Visit Coaches?

One of the more elusive tricks that ADs can utilize is trying to go unnoticed by flying commercial, not private. On Thursday's first episode of 'Coach Prime' on Amazon, Colorado AD Rick George made light of the situation. Rather than flying into the local airport near Deion Sanders in Jackson, Mississippi, George flew into New Orleans hoping to go unnoticed.

Even though word started to leak about Deion Sanders taking the Colorado job, the search itself was pretty stealth compared to others. The 2003 coaching search with Auburn officials secretly interviewing Bobby Petrino at a Louisville area airport was a masterpiece. Fans and reporters had figured out that a plane carrying Auburn AD David Housel and president William Walker had been in Louisville on the Thursday before the Iron Bowl.

Everything about 'Jet-Gate' was wild, including Tuberville keeping his job at Auburn.

In terms of flying private and planes being tracked, usually there's not much of a problem, unless there's a fan working on the tarmac.

"I thought I was in the clear when it came to being tracked," one athletic director jokingly mentioned to OutKick. "I decided not to fly commercial this time because the pilot told us our plane couldn't be tracked through the website. Turns out the fans were on my tail before we took off. I didn't think of the guy who could be working on the tarmac being a fan with a social media account. Thirty minutes into my flight to visit a candidate, I was already receiving text messages from my assistant on the ground, letting me know that fans were watching the plane, not the tail number.

"I ended up asking the pilot if we could throw them off our trail by landing somewhere else to re-fuel the plane.

Flight Tracking Game In College Athletics Is Second To None

Remember the time the Florida athletic department had a plane headed for the New Hampshire area to interview Chip Kelly? I know Gator fans remember that night, with fans hiding in the bushes of the Gainesville airport to get a glimpse of what could be the new head coach. Turns out it was just the AD getting off the plane, but fans knew exactly where to look.

How about the Tennessee coaching search of 2017? If there was a fanbase I would recommend to Major League Baseball fans, it would most certainly come from the SEC.

The search for planes took a wild turn when former Tennessee athletic director John Currie couldn't escape the eyes of fans flight tracking. Never-mind his horrible job at covering the tracks for a trip to see NC State's Dave Doeren, the Greg Schiano trip was a disaster that ended his tenure.

Fans were already upset that Currie seemed to be on a trip around the United States to find the next coach, which included a visit with Mike Leach on a park bench in Los Angeles. This ended with the Tennessee brass in Columbus, Ohio where John Currie was finalizing a deal for Greg Schiano.

Once the fan-base figured out where the plane, and their soon to be fired athletic director were, all hell broke loose in Knoxville. You all should know the story by now, but let's just say Tennessee fans weren't excited about the hire.

How about Alabama's hunt for Nick Saban? Fans had figured out the intricate ways of FlightAware and used it to track former AD Mal Moore's plane from Tuscaloosa to the Miami area. Hundreds of Alabama fans were waiting on Nick Saban to arrive at the small airport, with fans surrounding the new coach.

Make The Move Shohei Ohtani Fans, Just Hire CFB Fans

If you've been doing this long enough, you uncover a few crazy stories involving a coaching search. One of the wildest instances of this came when a current armed forces pilot had his own way of tracking planes.

Schools usually turnoff the ability to track their plane, so you have to get creative when trying to decipher where a search is headed. Now this would be pretty difficult, unless you had someone who knew how to track planes on radar or had enough clearance to watch planes head to their destination by tail number.

Shohei Ohtani #17 of the Los Angeles Angels in the dugout while playing the Detroit Tigers at Angel Stadium of Anaheim on September 17, 2023 in Anaheim, California. (Photo by John McCoy/Getty Images)

Yes, this is how crazy a coaching search can get for fans and school administrators.

So, Major League Baseball fans should take a page out of the college football playbook and learn how to properly track planes. You don't even need a tail number if you've got someone in the armed forces or private airline business helping you.

MLB fans let the experts down on Friday while pursuing the whereabouts of Shohei Ohtani. Next time just ask a college football fanbase to make life easier.

I want to hear about your favorite coaching search and the theatrics that came with it. Email me at trey.wallace@outkick.com and share the wildest stories.

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