The great lengths of conference realignment
ACC teams will travel nearly 2x as far this football season
With the college football season kicking off, the reality — and oddity — of adding Stanford, Cal and SMU to the ACC is here. Each team’s conference slate shows the great lengths that college sports has gone to restructure itself, as geography is no longer the organizing force.
In a previous post, we gave a warm welcome to the conference newcomers, but there’s not much else welcoming about their conference schedules. The new schools have three of the four longest distances to travel to conference road games1, and Cal is traveling more than 2,000 miles on average. For context, the continental U.S. is about 2,800 miles wide, so the Golden Bears are paying the price of the cross-country conference membership.
Cal is an extreme example, but the ACC holdovers will have plenty of layovers, too. NC State (+652 miles) and Wake (+583 miles) have the biggest increases in conference travel, as each has a trip to the Bay Area this season.
On average, ACC schools are traveling about 80% further compared to their conference games last year. The average distance to a conference road game has increased from 457 miles (about the distance between Syracuse and Virginia Tech2) to 818 miles (about the distance between Louisville and Boston College3).
With a conference map that now looks like this, it’s no surprise the “Atlantic Coast” conference has some absurd miles to travel.
The distances are calculated based on the latitude and longitude of each school (as maintained by the Department of Education), not necessarily the football stadiums. The distance is also measured “as the crow flies” (via the Haversine formula) so the actual travel distance between flights and busses would likely be longer.
461 miles between Cuse and VT
819 miles between Lville and BC