Ex-Pac-12 Teams Will Face Some of The Worst Travel Distances in Power-Conference History

That's in the modern era of power conferences, at least. (Good luck to Cal and UCLA in particular.)

The Golden Bears and Bruins don’t play each other this year; instead, they play some of the most far-flung opponents imaginable. (Katelyn Mulcahy/Getty Images)

For the sake of full disclosure: I don’t like college football’s recent realignments.

Like, at all.

Yes, some of that just boils down to an old man yelling at a cloud because things aren’t how they were when he was 13. But it’s also just objectively weird and confusing to have Stanford in the ACC and Washington in the Big Ten. And it doubles down on the trend of increasingly spread-out and geographically nonsensical conference memberships (and names), making both problems far worse.

I’m usually not one for pearl clutching, “think of the children”-type concern trolling. But the amount of travel that teams from the former Pac-12 are going to have to do this year is truly nuts.

That goes across all sports — particularly the ones that can’t fly charter. But just looking at football alone, some of these teams are going to be logging something in the neighborhood of 20,000 miles by the end of the regular season, before we even consider additional games for conference championships, bowl games or the expanded College Football Playoff.

How historic are these distances going to get? I crunched the numbers on this year’s schedule, with its many teams in strange new conferences, and compared each team’s distances traveled — total and per-game — with those of power-conference teams (plus Notre Dame) in previous seasons going back to 1993, when Penn State joined the Big Ten. After looking at this data, it becomes clear that the 2024 campaign for ex-Pac-12 squads — and the teams that have to go visit them — will be among the most grueling slogs in college football history:

We should note that Hawaii — playing in the MWC, a non-power conference — perennially faces ridiculous travel logistics; this year, they’ll be traveling a total of 29,777 miles, or 2,481.4 per game.¹ But it’s pretty unheard-of for a power-conference school to have to log Rainbow Warriors-style mileage throughout the season.

The only previous cases that have come close involve special circumstances. In 2016, California opened its season (against Hawaii, ironically) in Sydney, Australia — 7,442 miles from Berkeley — before heading back to the U.S. to play San Diego State.

But that trip comes with something of an asterisk: the Aztecs game was 16 days later, which should have at least ameliorated the travel effects some, despite the trip contributing to the Golden Bears traveling 19,680 total miles that season. Similarly, Stanford in 2017 made that same voyage down under to kick off its season, adding to its travel-distance tally.

More similar to the plight for this year’s former Pac-12 schools are cases like Boston College in 1996 and Colorado in 2011 — both of whom opened their seasons out in Honolulu. UCLA will do the same this year, which is part of why the Bruins have the highest average per-game travel distance of any team that didn’t go all the way to Australia.

But that’s only the beginning. UCLA will travel no fewer than 956 miles for any of their games all season until the finale at home against Fresno State, the second of two back-to-back home contests after facing crosstown rival USC. The rest of their schedule involves visits to LSU, Penn State, Rutgers, Nebraska and Washington, of which only the Baton Rouge trip isn’t within the conference:

The average UCLA in-conference game involves them traveling 1,717.2 miles, which would be a new modern power-conference record (by a margin of over 500 miles over Stanford’s previous mark from 2017)… if it weren’t for the fact that Cal has to travel an average of 1,879.3 miles for each conference game in its new ACC digs. All told, 2024 will feature each of the seven largest average travel distances per conference game for power teams since 1993, as well as 10 of the Top 14 and 12 of the Top 18:

The former Pac-12 schools jump off the page, and rightly so. But existing conference members, teams like Miami, are on this list, too — in the Canes’ case because they have to go out to California to play the Bears, then head back to Louisville and then go up to Syracuse later in the season. (Florida State has no such excuse; they get Cal at home, but their travel distance is inflated by a trip to Ireland to face my Yellow Jackets.)

All of this is the consequence of having some of the weirdest, most spread-out team configurations in college sports history. Just take a look at this table of teams whose home locations are the furthest from the geographic center of their conference in the modern era:

Before 2023, only Miami during its Big East era had ever been so much as 900 miles from the central point of its conference’s geographic area. Now, eight teams will be a thousand miles from the center of their conference, with six teams over 1,400 miles and two — Cal and Stanford in the ACC — pushing 2,000 miles from the center of the conference.

There’s no way any of this makes sense from a logistical standpoint, among many other factors that would cause you to question the sustainability (and sanity) of such an arrangement. I’m not naïve enough to think this has anything to do with something other than money, of course — and relatedly, not being left without a seat when the music stops. But this season, we’ll see what happens when you prioritize those things over common sense, and it will show up with some severely jet-lagged and fatigued teams after logging all of those travel miles.

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Filed under: College Football

1. This type of calculation simply looks at the distances between destinations for each game, without any assumptions that the team went back to campus in between road games during off-weeks, etc.