Oregon Ducks travel thousands of miles with conference change to Big Ten

After joining the Big Ten Conference, the Oregon Ducks basketball team has traveled more than 26,000 miles. That’s more than the circumference of the Earth. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Oregon players are not alone as dramatic increases were seen for all of the 10 schools that left the Pac-12, ranging from 47% to 222% more miles traveled. Laine Higgins is a sports reporter for the WSJ and reported on this trend. She joins us to share more.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. After joining the Big Ten Conference and before the NCAA tournament, the Oregon Ducks men’s basketball team traveled nearly 27,000 miles. It’s more than the circumference of the earth. It’s also, as Laine Higgins in the Wall Street Journal recently put it, the longest road trip in college basketball’s 132-year history. But the Ducks aren’t alone. All of the 10 schools that left the Pac-12 saw dramatic increases in the number of miles traveled, from 47% to 222% increases.

Sports reporter Laine Higgins joins us now with more details. It’s great to have you on the show.

Laine Higgins: Thanks so much for having me.

Miller: So as I just said, you found that the Ducks men’s basketball team traveled nearly 27,000 miles this season, and that was before the conference tournament and the NCAA tournament. What was their travel like before leaving the Pac-12?

Higgins: Certainly less. It’s not that they were traveling none, because Oregon would still go and play the two schools in Arizona, and they would go up to Pullman, Washington. But they never went farther east than Boulder, Colorado in the mountain time zone, and that was their longest trip. So they would go to all the places in the Pac-12, but they were never going two time zones away. They were never going as far as State College, Pennsylvania.

Miller: So State College, Pennsylvania. Where else are they going right now?

Higgins: So the other places that the Ducks went this year were Ohio State, they went to Iowa, they went to Michigan and Michigan State. They also, before the conference schedule got underway, went to Las Vegas for a tournament, although that’s pretty normal for most teams to do some sort of trip out to a tournament that’s somewhere different. They went to Minnesota, they went to UCLA, which they had been doing previously, and they also went to Wisconsin. I think it was all told five trips cross country at various points, not including their trip to Indianapolis for the Big Ten Tournament.

Miller: What kinds of things did conference officials try to do to minimize travel for teams that had come in from the Pac-12, or just travel in general?

Higgins: One of the things that a lot of conferences have done, the Pac-12 students as well, is that they would try to pair opponents close to each other. So for instance, in the Pac-12, when Oregon would go play Arizona, they would play Arizona on Thursday and Arizona State on a Saturday, so that way you don’t have to fly back and forth twice, you can just take a bus between the campuses and fly back. The Big Ten did that as well. So for instance, when Oregon played Ohio State, it played Penn State a couple days later. Same with this trip to Michigan and Michigan State, those are sort of combined.

But the one issue with doing that is the Big Ten has a rule where you can’t play games less than two days apart. You have to have at least two days between all these games. So even when you’re on a combined road trip to play Michigan and Michigan State, those games are three days apart. You’re going out a day early. So your road trips are still going to be four or five days at a minimum.

Miller: So maybe less travel … it’s better than flying separately to Michigan twice, but the overall trip away from Eugene, in this case, gets even longer.

Higgins: Right. And the issue with jet lag is the general rule is that it takes about a day per hour that you travel. If you’re moving one time zone, that’s pretty minimal. But if you’re going out to the East Coast from Oregon, that’s say three days. For this road trip, when they were out playing Ohio State and Penn State, they were there for six days and five nights, which means that you’re jet lagged on the way there and you’re jet lagged on the way back once you come home.

Miller: How are the Ducks flying? Are they just getting on commercial airplanes?

Higgins: Thankfully, no. There once was a time when that was the norm for Oregon basketball. But as money has gone up in college basketball and college sports generally, that is no longer the case. One of the things that the team had to do to make this possible was use a charter jet. So there’s a 68-person plane that the team uses. They’re not having to do these crazy layovers, and worry about losing their luggage, their team uniforms and whatnot.

Not every campus is in a major city. Like obviously, USC, UCLA are close enough to several airports in the Los Angeles area. But getting to West Lafayette, Indiana for a game against Purdue, if you’re flying commercial, you are almost certainly connecting somewhere. So Oregon at least doesn’t have to do that.

Miller: This is, as you noted, a lot of time zone changing. Are there studies about how that can affect player performance?

Higgins: Absolutely. The issue with time zone change and jet lag is that it impacts your sleep. And when you are not sleeping as much, that then can impair a lot of your cognitive functions – your focus, your memory and your retention. It can also impact some hand-eye coordination and motor skills. It’s almost a little bit like being drunk when you get to a certain point. And unfortunately, a lot of these things that it impacts are also things that you need to be a good basketball player. You need to be able to remember the play that the coach is telling you, you need to be alert and focused, you need to be able to move your body and be coordinated. So it can have a really negative impact on how these players are doing on the court.

Miller: But you did point out that the Ducks finished their regular season with a 24-8 record, a good seed in the NCAA tournament. It’s worth saying, for folks who don’t already know this, the Ducks are out. They did lose in the second round. But they had a pretty good regular season. Did the team do anything to mitigate all this travel time, all this time in the air?

Higgins: So what’s funny is, yes and no. A lot of the teams that were going to be going to conferences that are far flung – for instance Stanford and Cal that were going to the ACC and going out to the East Coast all the time – they did some pretty extreme measures and their basketball teams just happened to not be that good this year. Whereas, Dana Altman, the coach of Oregon, basically said “Look, we can’t make Oregon any closer to the East Coast, so we’re just going to deal with it. We’re not going to talk about it. We’re not going to complain about it. We’re just gonna power through.”

But that’s not to say they did nothing. When they’re on these plane rides, they would be encouraging the players to hydrate, be drinking lots of water and to be eating snacks accordingly. Granted, these are college basketball players that can probably eat a horse every time they sit down for a meal, so that wasn’t so much of an issue. But the big thing is they encourage them not to take naps on the plane. So that way when you get to the destination, you’re a little bit tired, which in theory makes it easier to fall asleep at night. Which is no guarantee. But again, these are college players that are working their butts off and are probably tired enough that they can fall asleep at night most nights. So that ended up being pretty minimal in terms of the changes that they made.

What’s surprising is college basketball is a sport that notoriously is hard to win on the road. I think the overall winning percentage for road teams this year was something in the 30s, whereas Oregon won the majority of its road games, which means that they’re already above average in a lot of ways. So maybe this team is just a good basketball team, and they had a hard schedule to get through and they managed it well. Or maybe this team was even better than that, and had they not been traveling as much, they would have won eight games instead of six games on the road. It’s hard to say.

Miller: What does all this mean in terms of academics?

Higgins: It makes it really hard to be a regular student. For one …

Miller: Can we say, make it even harder to be a regular student?

Higgins: Yes! So I was a college athlete myself, and I remember what it’s like to be juggling this when you’re traveling to competitions, you’re studying on a bus and you’re taking an exam in the lobby of a Holiday Inn. That’s just always kind of been the reality for college athletes. But, Oregon, to make this work, they had to have all of their players take online only classes this term. Oregon has the quarter system, so they are able to, basically from January to March, just be doing online stuff. At the beginning of the season, you’re still in-person classes. At the end of the season, if you’re making a deep run, you would still be in in-person classes.

But not every class is online. Not every class works around your practice schedule. The practice schedule piece is a reality that’s always existed for college athletes, but the virtual classes may limit your major. If you are trying to be pre-med and take labs, it probably means that you can’t do that during your season. And if it’s a class that’s only offered during a certain term, it makes it really difficult. Plus, if you’re doing online-only classes, you’re missing out on those in-person interactions with your professor and with your classmates. So it definitely makes it a different experience.

Miller: What did you hear from players about what all this was like?

Higgins: They kind of didn’t mind it that much. I asked them if they were wistful that they weren’t getting the frequent flyer miles because they were flying on a private charter. And they were like “Yeah, we don’t care, we’re flying private. It’s awesome.” And these guys had a lot of time to watch movies, they had a lot of time to bond with their teammates. And they said that actually ended up being really great because they had so much downtime on the plane that they were able to get a little bit closer and be a little bit more cohesive in the games.

Miller: There’s also the environmental impact of this, the massive carbon footprint of nearly 27,000 air miles. Did anybody at the university level or the conference level talk about this?

Higgins: Not to me when I was having conversations with them. It’s probably a concern, but I think in the grand scheme of college sports, this was not the primary concern. If we really were trying to run college sports in an environmentally friendly way, you would not have conferences that span the entire United States, you would play regional schedules, you would be driving places. But that’s just not how college sports works because it’s about the money, and anything else is a secondary consideration.

Miller: When we did a Ducks football team preview in the fall, we heard that with as much extra flying as that team was going to be doing this year, it was actually a lighter travel schedule than it is likely to be in future years – that was just the way the home and away games were set up for the football team this year. Do you know if there’s anything similar for basketball? Could things get even worse for the Ducks in future years?

Higgins: Marginally. I don’t know that the Big Ten has put out that many future schedules, because it’s so complicated to figure out in basketball specifically. Football, you’re only doing 12 games per season, and the conference games, only nine of them in the Big Ten. But if you’re doing basketball, there are 20 games and 17 other opponents to play. So there’s this whole algorithm and matrix of how all this works. The Big Ten, to create this year’s schedule, spent about four months just going through that and working through all the hiccups.

This is to say, I don’t think it’s been finalized for next year. It’s possible the way the cookie crumbles that maybe instead of doing a trip to Minnesota and Iowa, you’re doing a trip to Maryland and Rutgers, and that’s a little bit farther. But anytime you do a schedule like this, there’s going to be some tradeoffs, and there’s probably going to be some years that are a little worse, some years that are a little better. But it’s still going to be more than it was in the Pac-12, at a minimum.

Miller: What does this travel mean for all the other athletes who don’t get a ton of national attention? Football is at the top in terms of money and attention, and then basketball. But then there’s golf, volleyball, soccer and tennis. What about them?

Higgins: It’s really hard because not all of those athletes have access to charters in the same way. So it’s possible that the volleyball team at a place like Nebraska, where it is very high profile, has an opportunity to fly on charters. But my guess is they’re flying commercial most of the time they’re doing these things. And it’s those sports, some of the Olympic sports like soccer, volleyball and softball, where you are playing a lot of conference games and you are traveling a lot, that are going to be the most impacted.

Something like golf, they play most of their matches at invitationals. So their travel isn’t really impacted that much because they’re not going to the campuses. It’s not like a lot of these campuses have golf courses where they do this. So in some ways, a golf team is more prepared to handle this because their schedule is not going to change that much. But it’s harder because you probably don’t have the resources and maybe you’re doing some road trips. I think it will impact where some of these athletes decide to go. If you chose to go to Oregon because your family lives in California and they can drive to a fair amount of the schools in the Pac-12 to see you, and then all of a sudden, you’re playing in the Big Ten, you’re not going to do a road trip to Pennsylvania. That’s a very different experience if you wanted to play close to home. So I think it might have some pretty big ramifications for the composition of these teams as well.

Miller: When the Pac-12 imploded, and a bunch of other conferences had these massive realignments, and schools jumped ship and went to different places, all largely because of football TV deal money and revenue in mind, we heard that eventually this could lead to a break in the entire model. There could be a nationalized system of football conferences in college football, but maybe the rest of college athletics would go back to more regional rivalries. People talked about that. It has seemed like a hope, maybe more than a possibility. But I’m wondering, first of all, if people are still talking about this seriously and if you think it’s a real possibility?

Higgins: I think it’s a real possibility, but the issue is the time horizon on this. Because in order to make this work, like any decision in college sports, it’s going to have to come down to the money. And in order to make a football breakaway league make sense, you need to be able to pool the TV rights, which means that you need all of the contracts that currently expire at different times for the various conferences to somewhat align, which they don’t. And you also need some sort of antitrust situation going on in your favor from the government in a way that allows, like the NFL, to broadcast its games and kind of collude with broadcasters to find the best deal with that. So there would need to be some sort of government intervention that would be secondary to all of the business reasons to do this.

And right now, the NCAA doesn’t control the top level of football. That’s controlled by the College Football Playoff. And you’re seeing some of the big conferences throw their weight around and try to secure more automatic bids for teams in their leagues. And again, that’s a play at getting more money, because the more teams you have, the more share of revenue you get from the TV rights.

It’s possible that that will be the first domino that falls as we move towards the separation, is that you have these big leagues that are pushing the smaller ones out, and that’s going to continue to make the rich richer, the poor poorer. And eventually, there’s maybe a tipping point when you decide it’s not worth it to be lumping together the smaller schools, the bigger schools in this way. Right now, they would claim that that’s one of the beautiful things about it. And one of the reasons why it’s all being held together is actually the NCAA tournament, because there’s something beautiful about the Cinderellas, and it works because of that. And granted, if the tournament expands, which it’s probably going to soon, there’s some worry that maybe that will also impact this. But I think, if at all, this is years off. It’s probably going to be a lot messier before it gets any sort more organized than it is now.

Miller: Laine Higgins, thanks very much.

Higgins: Thanks for having me.

Miller: Laine Higgins is a sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

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