After Realignment, How Far Will College Football Teams Travel During the Regular Season?

September 10, 2024 by CollegeFootballPoll.com Staff

Football teams do some miles - especially NFL teams, and especially Travis Kelcey with his football and Taylor Swift romance.

But we're not here to talk about the NFL, or Kelcey, or Swift. We're here to talk about college football teams. You might not think it, but they do some serious miles during a regular season.

Conference realignment is where the hassle is at. Believe it or not, the moves to expand the leagues come from marketing drives and media attention, bringing more financial returns.

But the reshuffling of leagues for football purposes cause a strain on all of the other sports teams, as well.. As they leave their home ground and join unrelated leagues, the travel mileage rises more than you can imagine. The expansion of the ACC to include teams like Stanford is one example.

And we've got some more specific statistics to prove it.

Stanford heads to Syracuse this week for its first ACC football clash, representing a round trip of over 5,600 miles. Then, the Cardinal head back to the east coast the following weekend for another big conference game at Clemson to add another 5,120 round trip miles.

The next week, it's Virginia Tech's turn to do the traveling as the Hokies head to Stanford for a 5,400-mile excursion, before the Cardinal hop back on the plane and log another 4,490 miles by going 2/3rds of the way across the North American continent to Notre Dame and back.

5,600 more miles await with one more cross-country trek later in the season when the Cardinal go to Raleigh, North Carolina to battle the NC State Wolfpack on November 2.

And, if Stanford's team catches magic in a bottle and gets to play for the ACC Championship, guess where they will be heading. Yep, back to North Carolina for a title match in Charlotte.

As we pointed out with the Virginia Tech trip, realignment increases the miles of all of that conference's legacy members, too. Louisville will fly to Stanford during the season, and so will Wake Forest.

Travel Distances of Power 5 Team Games

It is the Power Four conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC) that suffer the most. Especially as those leagues absorbed 10 of the 12 teams that used to reside in the PAC-12. Those schools used to be able to travel throughout California and up and down the Pacific seaboard to play all of their conference schedule. Or at least, no farther than the Rocky Mountains.

But now, UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington are all members of the Big Ten. Four more - Arizona, Arizona, Colorado and Utah -a re now situated in the Big 12.

 And now they’ve created a new 12-team play-off schedule which could make it worse.

Non-Conference Games Add to the Miles

Cal, the other PAC-12 school that has joined Stanford in the ACC, will have conference trips to Florida State, Pittsburgh and Wake Forest. Those trips will add to the 4,800 miles already covered by the Golden Bears with this past Saturday's non-conference game against Auburn from the SEC.

Those types of games are planned far in advance and are not easily changed. And let's not forget the desire to expand the reach internationally which is why we had ACC rivals Georgia Tech and Florida State opening the season Dublin, Ireland. That's an 8,000-mile round trip for each school when it could have been a short jaunt of only 260 miles each way had they simply stayed in the U.S.

Hopefully, the schools appreciated the warm Irish welcome. That's marketing and money for you!

Teams Traveling The Most in 2024

You can already see the 2024 schedule and calculate how many miles the teams will do - we guarantee the players already have.

Cal, Stanford and UCLA are easily over the 20,000-mile mark, and Washington joins the parade.

After next week's home game versus Northwestern, the Huskies will go to the University of New Jersey, i.e, Rutgers (5,682 miles). Two weeks later, the team will make back-to-back trips to Iowa and Indiana for a total of 8,213 miles. And after a single home game against USC, they will hop back on the plane and head to Penn State (5,228 miles). The 560-mile round trip to Eugene, Oregon will seem like a literal hop, skip and a jump.

Compare the air miles to the game hours and it's not looking good. The teams will easily spend more time in the air than they will play football on the ground. And then they have to weather the timezone changes, unfamiliar stadiums and towns, and sometimes sharply contrasting climates.

How They Stay Entertained and Ready to Play

It doesn't matter where you're going; nobody wants to travel as long as college football players do. But as with all travelers, they have found ways to keep themselves entertained. Just like you and I, some of them will play games on long travels, from regular video games to word games, or watch a movie or series or, more importantly, sleep for most of the journey! 

It's so essential to try to combat fatigue and jet lag with sleep at the right time when traveling.

Current Trends Impacting College Football Travel

• Increased Non-conference games: More and more teams are playing in intersectional matches, further increasing the travel distances.
• More cross-country conference mapping: The leagues are expanding and colleges travel more for the games. The best-positioned teams are in the middle of the country. We feel sorry for the teams traveling far outside their time zones.
• Multiple Time Zones Challenge: What time is it, anyway?

Affect on Game Play

You do have to wonder if anyone ever considered the affect that all of this extra traveling could have on the quality of the games, and whether it's fair that some teams travel much longer and total distances than others. The physical toll it takes to travel so much further compared to other teams could greatly impact performance. Even when you're going on vacation to relax, you know jet lag can be a real issue. The old joke is that we need another day of vacation to recover from the trip back from vacation.

Do you think you could travel the miles college football players do and still compete at a high level? Did anyone ever consider the affect on their performance as they look to make it to the NFL.

Yes, travel as a pro athlete is no piece of cake, but there are so much better accommodations and no school work to balance.

For those teams that make the 12-team playoff, it could be even tougher because there is very little time for planning travel to the game if you advance.