Distance Analysis of Possible Texas/Oklahoma Schools' Move to Pac 12

Barring the Big 12 attracting a new marquee school (or three) to raise its number of teams from the current nine, the conference seems likely to implode. One of the leading scenarios, given Texas A&M's departure from the Big 12, is for a quartet of Big 12 South schools (Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State) to join the Pac 12, making it the Pac 16 (one other Big 12 South school, Baylor, would be left behind). Here is how such a plan would look geographically.

A little over a year ago, the Sports Economist blog examined the change in Nebraska's travel distances to conference venues associated with the Cornhuskers' switch from the Big 12 to the Big 10. That article has inspired me to attempt a similar analysis for proposed Pac 16. The same article also happened to mention a useful piece of information, namely that, "The average distance between Pac 10 schools, the most dispersed group of the BCS conferences (before realignment began), was 731 miles."

It is worth repeating. Even before conference realignment got underway in the summer of 2010, the Pac 10 was already the nation's most geographically spread out conference. Adding Colorado and Utah stretches the conference's footprint even more with, for example, the University of Washington in Seattle sitting roughly 1,000 miles (998 to be exact) from the University of Colorado in Boulder. Throw in Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State, and we're looking at some huge distances between member schools.

Texas Tech (in Lubbock) is the westernmost school of the four potential new additions to a Pac 16, so it provides a conservative estimate of the travel distances the new schools would face. For most, if not all, match-ups with the existing Pac 12 schools, Texas, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State presumably would have to cover even greater distances than Texas Tech. For these reasons (plus the fact I'm a faculty member at Texas Tech and thus have a personal curiosity), I decided to investigate what the Red Raiders' average travel distance was to its rivals in the (original) Big 12 and what it would become in the proposed Pac 16. The website Travel Math proved to be an invaluable aid in researching travel distances.

The following chart shows the distances from Texas Tech (Lubbock) to each specific opponent, in miles.

Opponent	Big 12 (Original)	Pac 16 (Hypothetical)
Texas A&M	382	---
Baylor	308	---
Texas	332	332
Oklahoma	277	277
Oklahoma State	324	324
Colorado	482	482
Nebraska	574	---
Kansas	524	---
Kansas State	486	---
Missouri	647	---
Iowa State	736	---
Utah	---	742
Arizona	---	535
Arizona State	---	580
UCLA	---	942
USC	---	942
Stanford	---	1,172
California	---	1,183
Oregon	---	1,348
Oregon State	---	1,372
Washington	---	1,440
Washington State	---	1,213
AVERAGE	461	859

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The main conclusion to be gleaned from this table is that Texas Tech's average distance to its conference rivals would nearly double, from 461 to 859, with a move to the Pac 12/16. Though the football team and perhaps some other revenue-generating sports would fly on chartered flights that avoid layovers, many teams would still presumably fly commercial. I consulted the travel schedules for Southwest Airlines, which I would say is the primary carrier from the Southwest to the West Coast (another leading airline out of Lubbock, American/American Eagle, would require first flying east to Dallas, out of the way, before getting on another plane to go west). If Southwest did not fly to necessary cities, I checked for alternative plans on Orbitz.

Here are some sample trips Texas Tech teams would have to make within a proposed Pac 16. For any given destination, there are usual a few daily departure times from the originating city; for each trip, I have listed the flight schedule that requires the least travel time (departing on a Thursday, assuming a game on Friday or Saturday).

Lubbock to Los Angeles (to play UCLA or USC): 4 hours, 30 minutes (1 plane-change in Albuquerque)

Lubbock to San Jose (to play Stanford): 4 hours, 30 minutes (1 plane-change in Las Vegas)

Lubbock to Eugene (to play Oregon): 7 hours, 55 minutes (on United, 2 stops)

Lubbock to Seattle (to play Washington): 7 hours, 35 minutes (2 stops)

Over at the Texas Tech athletics discussion site RaiderPower.com and on other boards, the idea of four four-team "pods" has been suggested (see the following table). To create a nine-game conference football schedule, for example, a school could play every opponent in its own pod, plus two schools (one at home, one away) each from the other three pods.

Washington	Stanford	Arizona	Texas
Wash. St.	California	Ariz. St.	Texas Tech
Oregon	UCLA	Colorado	Oklahoma
Ore. St.	USC	Utah	Okla. St.

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For the Texas/Oklahoma schools, such a plan would require one trip to a California school and one to a Pacific Northwest school, annually. That wouldn't be so bad, some might argue. Indeed, two long trips might not be so bad for any single team in a particular sport. But taking all the sports in the aggregate (football, baseball, softball, men's and women's basketball, men's and women's tennis, women's volleyball, women's soccer, and others), the travel bills would quickly add up.

For some sports, perhaps a barnstorming strategy could be used. For example, Texas Tech's women's soccer squad could take a nine-day journey to the Northwest to play Washington, Washington State, Oregon, and Oregon State on a Friday-Sunday-Friday-Sunday schedule. Doing so would require only one long round-trip by air, with the ability to drive from campus to campus. Even if such a long trip were never scheduled, the amount of classroom time missed would almost certainly go up in a Pac 16 compared to a more geographically compact conference.

Just as the teams would have to travel great distances, so too would fans. Large contingents of visiting fans from Texas, Texas A&M, and Oklahoma help Texas Tech fill its football stadium. As one of my faculty colleagues asked (perhaps rhetorically), would comparably large traveling parties from WSU or Oregon State make the trip to Lubbock?

Should the Big 12 implode, most fans of Texas Tech (and probably also Oklahoma State) would likely consider it a "must" that their school find a home in a conference at least as prestigious as the Big 12, to avoid a considerable downgrade in the school's athletic reputation. Such an outlook is understandable for a die-hard supporter of a school's sports teams. Texas, it has been hinted, could try to make a go of it as an independent, at least in football, whereas Oklahoma likely could land in a major conference without much trouble (perhaps the Big 10, where it would be re-paired with its old rival Nebraska, or the SEC, if not the Pac 12).

Conference USA, which currently includes four Texas schools (Houston, Rice, SMU, and Texas-El Paso), plus nearby Tulane (in New Orleans) and Tulsa, would allow Texas Tech (along with current Big 12 mate Baylor) to stay in a geographically compact league, without the seemingly exorbitant cost in travel time and money that a Pac 16 move would entail. The scholastically elite Rice and Tulane would also allow C-USA members to point to positive academic role models (similar to Stanford and Cal-Berkeley in the Pac 12).

Although my discussion has been undertaken through the lens of Texas Tech, the factors addressed -- travel time and expenses, geographic compactness, athletic prestige, and academics -- must be considered by any schools seeking to extend (via their league offices) or accept an invitation to a new and distant conference.