(01-21-2023 11:12 AM)RUScarlets Wrote: There are only a handful of road travel pairs that work in the current B1G. NWU + Madison. Purdue/Illinois/Indiana (any 2/3 in that triangle). MSU/UM. Minn/Iowa OR Iowa/UN. That means UCLA and USC would have to play @NWU or @Iowa every year in BBall just to hit the aforementioned pairs. NWU and Iowa versus LA are not attractive BBall matchups for Fox. But that's just how you are going to have to do it to minimize the door to door time. Everything else is a 4hr plus bus trip...
Happy Valley to Columbus??? Nope
Madison to St Paul??? Brutal
Rutgers/Happy Valley/Maryland... difficult but you are forced to do it.
So let's say you're playing 19 games. That's 11/4/4. UCLA has to play three pairs every year on the road. Again, NWU/Iowa groups plus Indianas/Illinois plus UM/MSU plus Rutgers/PSU/Maryland. Ohio St Minn and UN are potential solo road games every year among others. Of course, they can still play only 17 conference games with an 11/3/3 and cut a two-game road trip, but it doesn't change the facts above.
Here’s the classic East Coast bias where people in the East overestimate distances between Eastern/Central Time Zone schools and underestimate the distances between schools in the West.
The Pac-12 has used a travel pair system with all of the natural in-market/state/region pairs.
Washington to Washington State is only around 20 minutes shorter than Columbus to State College for a bus ride and actually *longer* than every single one of the other Big Ten pairs that you’ve mentioned (including Iowa to Nebraska and the supposedly “brutal” Wisconsin to Minnesota trip).
Colorado-Utah is also a travel pair for the Pac-12, yet that’s an even longer distance than any distance between two primary rivals in the Big Ten.
Are USC and UCLA going to need to take *more* longer road trips? Yes.
However, the distance between any two natural travel pairs in the Big Ten isn’t going to be any issue compared to what USC and UCLA already see in the Pac-12 travel pairs.
The Big Ten travel pairs are pretty simple (with Google Maps time travel inserted):
Rutgers - Maryland (2 hours 52 minutes)
Penn State - Ohio State (4:53)
Michigan - Michigan State (0:54)
Indiana - Purdue (1:55)*
Illinois - Northwestern (2:32)
Wisconsin - Minnesota (3:54)
Iowa - Nebraska (4:12)
* If IU-PU is a travel pair, a team would likely stay in Indianapolis as midpoint with the distance being about an hour each to IU and PU in opposite directions along with a large number of hotels plus the airport access. That’s actually as easy or easier than the Stanford/Cal (getting through 40 miles of Bay Area traffic), Oregon/Oregon State and Arizona/Arizona State pairings in the Pac-12.
Compare this to the Washington - Washington State (4:30) and Colorado - Utah (7:19) travel pairs that USC/UCLA already deal with in the Pac-12.
I’m not discounting the number of flights and crossing time zones for USC/UCLA. That’s going to be difficult. However, we shouldn’t be overstating the distances between the travel pairs in the Big Ten assuming that the league uses that travel structure at least for USC/UCLA basketball (and maybe baseball) games. Once again, what Eastern people think is a “far” distance in the East is considered “close” in the West.
Plus, I doubt buses are going to be used in the longer pairs like Ohio State - Penn State (at least for basketball where there are chartered flights) anyway.
I’m not sure where you’re going with 17/19 conference games. There are 20 conference games and that’s ironclad with the Big Ten’s commitment to their TV partners. If that means USC and UCLA each have one stray single game non-travel pair road game per year, then that’s what will happen.