Iowa Hawkeyes among Big Ten leaders in 2024 travel distance
I hope this 2024 Iowa Hawkeyes football team likes traveling.
The Hawkeyes will be doing a ton of that in the newly revamped 2024 Big Ten Conference schedule. One of the biggest challenges in the new Big Ten will be that travel dynamic. No other conference in the country stretches literally from sea to shining sea, from fast east Piscataway, NJ to the sunny west coast of Los Angeles, Calif. This truly is the America that James K. Polk envisioned.
As broken down by Cameron Salerno of CBS Sports, no team in college football will have to travel more than USC and UCLA. Truly the price of admission into the Big Ten.
The team who travels the most in Big Ten play behind the Southern California schools is Nebraska — and USC and UCLA are traveling over 225% more than Nebraska’s 7,022 mile roundtrip conference schedule. Purdue and Indiana travel the least in the conference next fall, and the new schools will travel 618% more miles than its conference foes. – Salerno, CBS Sports.
I bet whoever at UCLA had the bright idea to schedule nonconference road games at Hawaii and LSU is absolutely kicking themself.
The Iowa Hawkeyes will travel the fourth-most total miles for Big Ten away games with 6,682. While Nebraska slightly edges out Iowa thanks in large part to their trips to UCLA and Penn State, Iowa has another layer to the mileage.
Iowa has to travel to play USC on the road. The Trojans should undoubtedly be a top-10 ranked team for the occasion. This will be the first time the Hawkeyes play a Power 5 opponent west of Nebraska during the regular season since 2010. In addition, the Hawks also have to travel to Columbus, Ohio, to take on Ohio State, likely another top-10 ranked team.
Iowa also has to travel to play Rutgers. That means they have to go all the way to Northern Jersey. Eww!
If you are a Hawkeye fan planning on making that trip, mentally prepare yourself. The smell of the northern half of the my state is pretty fitting for the teams that play up there.
Distance traveled and the unfortunate situation of having to visit northern New Jersey are just a few of the new obstacles of the revamped Big Ten that Iowa will have to navigate.
The 2024 Hawkeyes: Truly from sea to shining sea.
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