When the Regents this week contemplate UC-Berkeley's move to the ACC and the travel implications of that move, they will undoubtedly have seen either the analysis below from the San Francisco Chronicle or something like it. The Chronicle article compares UC-Berkeley in the ACC with the travel issues faced by U of Hawaii teams that must fly to the mainland for competitions:
...Just look at Hawaii’s travel itinerary this past weekend for its game at No. 13 Oregon. After losing 55-10 on Saturday in front of 52,779 fans at Autzen Stadium, the Rainbow Warriors took a bus an hour north to Salem, Ore., where they stayed the night before riding another hour north to Portland and boarding a six-hour Hawaiian Airlines flight to Honolulu. Such logistics often put Hawaii at a competitive disadvantage, but that’s reality for a cash-strapped athletic department located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. As Vallejo native and Rainbow Warriors men’s basketball guard JoVon McClanahan put it, “No one’s going to feel bad for us that we have to travel further than other schools. We just have to be pros about it.”
Cal and Stanford must adopt a similar mindset as they prepare to join the Atlantic Coast Conference next August. With far less TV revenue about to come in than many of their ACC peers, and travel schedules that could rival Hawaii’s as the most burdensome in Division I, the Bears and Cardinal have a lot to hammer out over the next 11 months. Every current ACC school, including non-football member Notre Dame, is more than 2,000 miles from the Bay Area and in the Eastern Time Zone. Like Hawaii has done for decades, Cal and Stanford figure to touch down in cities two days before conference away games so they can rest up for competition and acclimate to the time difference.
Commercial flights, the mode of travel for almost all the Bay Area duo’s non-revenue sports, could also force the Bears and Cardinal to stay an extra night. This means more days in hotels, more team-provided meals and more classes missed — a daunting proposition for academically rigorous universities like Cal and Stanford that were so eager to stay at the Power 5 level that they settled for only a 30% share of TV revenue during their first seven years in the ACC.
USC and UCLA, which join the Big Ten next summer, reportedly plan to ease cross-country travel concerns by spending eight figures annually to bolster academic tutoring, mental health support and flight arrangements. But while the Trojans and Bruins are poised to more than double their yearly TV revenue thanks to a Big Ten media-rights deal that will net each of them between $65 million and $75 million, Cal and Stanford are about to earn way less money than they did in the Pac-12...
Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/college/article/cal-stanford-acc-travel-hawaii-18367174.php.
And there is this chart to contemplate:
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