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Syracuse football averaging 593 miles per roadtrip in 2021

While it’s in the top half of the ACC by distance, it’s not as bad as one would assume.

By John Cassillo
NCAA Football: Boston College at Syracuse Mark Konezny-USA TODAY Sports

Since the move to the ACC, plenty of Syracuse Orange fans have bemoaned distance to other teams in the conference as a main point of contention. Granted, we were just as far from teams in the Big East, and had to schedule more non-conference roadtrips there too. But with so many ACC opponents south of the Mason-Dixon line, there’s at least a little more travel required of Syracuse now.

With this in mind, the good folks at Reddit CFB (user JeromesNiece, to be exact) calculated the projected miles traveled — to every stadium, not roundtrip — for every FBS team during the 2021 regular season, including total distance, average and median miles. Syracuse came in at an average of 592.8 miles per roadtrip, and a total of 2,964 miles across this year’s five away games.

How does that look when compared to other ACC squads? Since there are a varying number of road games per team, we just looked at the averages in the league below:

(ranked by highest average distance)

  1. Miami (677.2 miles)
  2. Virginia (668.8 miles)
  3. Syracuse (592.8 miles)
  4. Boston College (526.5 miles)
  5. NC State (495.0 miles)
  6. Florida State (493.8 miles)
  7. Georgia Tech (411.2 miles)
  8. Louisville (407.8 miles)
  9. Virginia Tech (400 miles)
  10. Wake Forest (346.7 miles)
  11. Pittsburgh (340.2 miles)
  12. Clemson (313.8 miles)
  13. North Carolina (271.0 miles)
  14. Duke (93.8 miles)

Now yes, Syracuse still travels one of the longest average distances in the entire league. But it’s still not the most. Miami, a geographic outlier like the Orange but in the other direction, has the most. And despite being right in the heart of the conference footprint, UVA finds itself traveling a ton as well (you can thank a trip to BYU for that mileage).

For SU, the longest trip all year is in league play — 980 miles to Tallahassee to play Florida State — and we have that one every other year.

Seeing this isn’t necessarily surprising, even if Duke averaging less than 100 miles per road game might be. But it’s informative when looking at how Syracuse schedules non-conference road games, too. This year’s date with Ohio is less than 550 miles away and we typically put MAC teams on the slate over those in C-USA, the Mountain West or Sun Belt. Travel costs could be part of why that is, since we already have a ton of miles baked into the league schedule as it is.

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