A drone was caught flying over the Falcons' pre-Super Bowl practice

Atlanta Falcons
(Image credit: Tim Warner/Getty Images)

Security officers grounded a drone operated by a local resident over the Atlanta Falcons' pre-Super Bowl practice on Thursday, NFL.com reports. The team was practicing at the Rice University campus, near Houston's NRG Stadium where the championship game will be held Sunday night. It is unclear how the drone was caught, and the Falcons' practice security went otherwise undisturbed.

The Falcons have good reason to be wary of possible surveillance, as their Super Bowl rivals, the New England Patriots, are known to have secretly filmed New York Jets' defensive coaches' signals in violation of NFL rules. In a scandal dubbed "Spygate," the team was disciplined for the surveillance in 2007.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.