College football season is well and truly underway now with the opening weekend seeing No. 10 Florida State falling to Georgia Tech at Aviva Stadium in Dublin.
Of course, the 2024-25 NCAA Football season will see the conference realignments in full force with what was the Pac-12 becoming Pac-2 and stalwarts like Stanford, Washington and UCLA heading to ‘greener’ conferences.
The new conferences also means newer travel schedules and we decided to scour the entire schedule to determine which teams will be traveling the most throughout the 2024-25 season.
Methodology
Data Collection
The official schedule for the 2024-25 NCAA College Football season was extracted from the ESPN College Football schedule.
An automated Python script was developed to scrape and collect the schedule data for all weeks of the season. The script retrieved details for each game, including the teams involved, game dates, and locations.
Only data for D-1 games was considered.
Data Transformation
Cleaning: The raw data underwent cleaning to remove any irrelevant or incomplete entries. This included filtering out non-game events and ensuring each game entry had accurate team names and locations.
Geocoding: Each game's location was marked with geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude). This was done using Python’s geocoding libraries to convert stadium names or cities into precise coordinates.
First Game Consideration: The first game of the season, which was played in Dublin, Ireland, was noted as a special case due to its international location, requiring significant travel for both participating teams.
Data Analysis
Distance Calculation: The Haversine formula, implemented in Python, was used to calculate the great-circle distance between the coordinates of the home and away locations for each game. This formula provides an accurate measure of the distance between two points on the Earth’s surface.
Total Travel Distance: The total travel distance for each team was calculated by summing up the distances for all their away games during the season.
Special Considerations: For teams involved in neutral-site games (like the Dublin game), the distance traveled was calculated from their home location to the game location, and back, if applicable.
Former Pac-12 teams facing long travel schedules
With teams located on the West Coast scheduled to play games on the East Coast, it’s no surprise that former Pac-12 sides like UCLA, California and Stanford feature in the top spots.
The top spot, however, belongs to Hawaii as the Rainbow Warriors are scheduled to travel a total of 14,879 miles throughout the season. That’s approximately 4000 miles more than second placed UCLA who will be traveling 11,026.504 miles in the 2024-25 season.
UCLA are followed by sister school California and former Pac-12 rivals Stanford, Washington and USC. Among former Pac-12 schools, Oregon don’t have to travel as much with their scheduled 6,261.83 miles being the 13th highest among all teams.
Interestingly, only three teams will be traveling over 10,000 miles during the season – Hawaii, UCLA and California.
| Away Team | Amount of Times to Fly | Total Distance to Cover (Km) | Total Distance to cover(Mi) |
| Hawaii | 5 | 23939.99022 | 14878.80064 |
| UCLA | 6 | 17741.64552 | 11026.50436 |
| California | 5 | 16619.15038 | 10328.8691 |
Teams with least taxing travel schedules
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Texas Southern who are only traveling 4.23 miles when facing D1 schools. Their scheduled trip is to neighbouring Rice. North Carolina Central, Northern Colorado, North Carolina A&T are in the same boat, only traveling once to face a D1 school. For the full dataset click [HERE.]
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