Auburn-Kentucky Broadcast Cuts Out For Most Of Second Half After Fire

Auburn rolled into Rupp Arena on Saturday afternoon and made easy work of Kentucky, picking up a 94-78 win, but fans around the country didn't actually get to see a whole lot of the game.

With a little more than 12 minutes left in the second half, the ABC broadcast of the game lost both its picture and the audio from the feed. Viewers were left with a blue screen before commercials finally started rolling on the broadcast. 

Commercials continued to play for around seven straight minutes before the network sent an update saying, "For those of you watching on ABC, they’re having technical difficulties inside Rupp Arena. We want to let you know, you will see Texas Tech and Kansas until they get things figured out here, the game that’s playing out right now over on ESPN."

While it was nice for the broadcast to finally give college hoops fans an update, they didn't actually get sent to a different college basketball game as was announced.

The pregame show of the Boston Bruins - Pittsburgh Penguins NHL game took over the ABC feed instead and stayed there for puck drop. Matt Jones of Kentucky Sports Radio reported the broadcast trouble came from a "major technical issue" involving a truck the ABC team brought to the Kentucky game.

It turns out the "major technical issue" was a generator catching fire.

The broadcast eventually resumed, but on ESPN News, with only 2:23 left in the game, which is when play-by-play announcer Dan Shulman explained the situation.

"Well we would like to welcome everyone back here," Shulman said. "We know we have been gone for a while now. … Here’s what happened: a generator here at Rupp Arena caught on fire. So, first and foremost, thankfully, form what we understand, everybody is OK, but obviously that knocked us off the air for a long long time. We are back."

ESPN issued an official statement after the game was finished.

"In a freak accident, a generator at Rupp Arena caught on fire causing us to lose power and be knocked off the air as a result," the network said. "Thankfully, no one was harmed on-site. We apologize that fans watching on ABC were impacted for a period in the second half."

Talk about an absolutely brutal way to welcome the month of March. Instead of watching two of the best teams in the nation battle it out at Rupp Arena, college hoops fans had no way of watching a majority of the contest. 

It's also worth noting that without a broadcast, referees could not do official reviews because of the outage, LEX18 reported, which could have created a nightmare scenario if it was a close game.