EUGENE – One of the main criticisms of conference realignment in college athletics is that it places travel burdens on teams playing in conferences far from where their schools are located. Oregon State is one of the teams most affected by this change, as starting in 2024, the West Coast powerhouse will primarily play teams from the central United States.
The Big Ten Conference will expand to a total of 18 teams in 2024, including Oregon, Washington Huskies, USC Trojans, and UCLA Bruins.
The Oregon Ducks will cover a whopping 15,222 miles during the 2024 football season (including a preseason trip to Oregon State), up from 9,172 miles during the 2023 regular season. Oregon's travel demand is facing an increase of nearly 40%.
Flights are inevitably much more expensive, but they are also taxing on staff and players, especially if they frequently switch time zones. In the Pac-12 Conference, the majority of Oregon State's games were played in Pacific or Mountain time, but with the move to the Big Ten Conference, more games will be played in the Central and Eastern time zones. It will be.
This year's schedule avoided schools like Rutgers and Penn State, so the Ducks won't have to make a trip to the Eastern time zone in 2024, but this isn't the case every year. It's not hard to imagine this travel distance increasing even further in the coming years and potentially becoming an even bigger factor in a team's performance in road games.
It's worth noting that some teams, like Washington, are going to be worse off than Oregon. The Huskies will have to fly further northwest than the Ducks. In addition, the University of California and Stanford will move to the Atlantic Coast Conference, which is comprised almost exclusively of Eastern time zone teams, creating even more taxing travel demands.
There are more resources than ever before in programs to help recover from these grueling expeditions, and one can only imagine the impact this will have on the daily lives of athletes and coaches.
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