The NFL recorded 10,852 drone violations near its stadiums between 2021 and 2025, the league told CNBC. It says only a few disrupted play. Until July, the local police outside a stadium could watch a drone but had no power to stop it.
CNBC calls the Jacksonville Jaguars the first team to publicly announce a deal for a system that can. Sentrycs, the counter-drone company owned by Ondas, told CNBC it would switch its system on for the first time for the Jaguars’ home game against the New England Patriots on 27 September. The Jaguars won 35–6. Nobody has said whether a drone turned up.
Who presses the button
Ondas announced the selection on 7 August. The Jaguars chose the system with local law enforcement and Legends Global, which runs EverBank Stadium. Ondas says police officers trained at the FBI’s counter-drone centre in Huntsville, Alabama, operate it. It has not named the agency or disclosed the price.
That split is what the SAFER SKIES Act was written for. The law took effect on 1 July and lets trained state and local police take down drones over airports and large events, a power only federal agencies held before. Steve Willoughby, acting head of the Department of Homeland Security’s counter-drone office, put the federal limit plainly in August: “we can’t be everywhere all the time.”
Taking the controls
Sentrycs does not jam. Ondas says the system reads a drone’s radio link, finds the pilot within seconds, and can take control of the drone and land it in a chosen spot. A jammer blocks whole frequencies, which is a hard sell in a stadium full of radios and phones.
The limit is the radio protocol. A takeover works only on drones whose link the system can decode, and Sentrycs’ own material names custom and self-built drones as a concern. In FlightBrief’s reading, that makes it a tool against the careless fan with a store-bought drone rather than someone who planned ahead.
The numbers behind it
NFL security chief Cathy Lanier told Congress in December 2024 that incursions over games grew from about a dozen in the 2017 season to 2,845 in 2023, as the federal rule records. A drone over M&T Bank Stadium forced a pause in the AFC Championship game in January 2024.
Training is the bottleneck. When the rule took effect, the FBI’s centre had certified 61 officers across about 46 agencies. Michael Torphy, who runs the FBI’s drone programme, said in August that about 500 officers had been trained since. He did not say how many of them are cleared to take a drone down.
Sentrycs told CNBC it has signed two more NFL teams, which CNBC could not confirm. The Jaguars’ next game at EverBank is on 1 November against the Indianapolis Colts. Their October home game against Houston is at Wembley, outside the law’s reach.
