When the University of Oregon announced last summer that it was joining the Big Ten conference, it discovered that its team would spend more time this season up in the air than actually playing basketball. Since their season began in November, the Ducks have crisscrossed the country so frequently that the total distance they’ve traveled this season amounts to 26,700 miles, the equivalent of traveling the entire circumference of planet Earth.
Oregon is by no means the only team racking up air miles this season, reports The Wall Street Journal (March 15-16, 2025). The most recent wave of conference realignment has stretched the bounds of geographic imagination in college sports, sending schools like California and Stanford to the Atlantic Coast Conference and plunking UCF (in Orlando) in the Big 12, traditionally based in the Great Plains.
The Big Ten did its best to design a schedule that mitigated the impact on West Coast teams. The conference tried to avoid scheduling away games when players would be taking final exams and sequenced opponents so that traveling teams could play two games on a single road trip. “The scheduling of it,” said the Big Ten CEO, “is a sport in itself.”
Doing this in practice, however, often meant Oregon was forced to spend several days away from campus. When the Ducks made their first cross-country trip to play Ohio State and Penn State in January, the team spent 6 days and 5 nights on the road. More troubling than the flying was the amount of time-zone hopping the team was forced into, which included two road trips to the eastern time zone and two more to the central. Internal clocks are most thrown off by eastward travel of 3-5 hours, which can negatively affect reaction time, concentration and athletic performance.
That’s not the only reason that Oregon’s road trips are more disruptive. In the Pac-12, league games only took place on Thursdays and Sundays. The Big Ten plays every night of the week. To make all the travel work with academics, every player at Oregon had enroll in online classes this term—the first time that’s happened.
The graphic below shows intraconference away game travel for former Pac-12 teams. 2023-24 is on the left and 2024-25 is on the right.
Classroom discussion questions:
- How can OM help with this problem?
- What about other college sports?
