For now, Clemson is still part of the Atlantic Coast Conference. With the Southeastern and Big Ten conferences triggering the latest conference realignments with their recent moves, that could change in the future, which would also alter future travel plans.
While Clemson and the rest of the ACC stand pat for now – the league’s grant of rights agreement with ESPN is playing a major role in that at the moment – The Clemson Insider is pondering a potential question for the Tigers’ future: How much farther would Clemson have to travel as a member of one of those megaconferences?
After taking a look at potential travel destinations in the SEC, we’re entertaining the hypothetical of Clemson joining the Big Ten here. Adding Clemson would change the Big Ten’s geographic footprint since the conference doesn’t yet have a football member in the Southeast. In fact, Ohio State, located 485 miles away in Columbus, is the closest Big Ten program to Clemson.
Yet that’s a hop, skip and a jump compared to the Big Ten’s latest additions. The conference now stretches coast to coast after poaching Southern Cal and UCLA from the Pac-12 as its 15th and 16th members. Those schools will begin competing in the Big Ten in 2024, adding a cross-country trip to Clemson’s travel schedule.
It’s hard to know how often the Tigers might have to trek to Los Angeles. While the ACC is one of the Power Five conferences that’s already announced plans to eliminate divisions in the future, the Big Ten hasn’t yet made that decision. So without knowing what the conference’s scheduling model would look like by the time Clemson joins the league, we’ll start with a broader look at the travel distances before getting more specific.
The distance from Clemson to every ACC stadium is a combined 5,794 miles, or nearly 10,000 fewer miles than the total distance to every Big Ten stadium. The Big Ten currently having two more teams than the ACC contributes to that difference, but not nearly as much as the hundreds if not thousands of miles that separate Clemson from every Big Ten school.
Even if Clemson was to make the four shortest trips as part of an eight-game conference slate during its first year in the league, which would include Ohio State, Indiana (520 miles), Maryland (530) and Penn State (654), the Tigers’ road schedule would cover 2,189 miles. That’s nearly 500 more miles than Clemson is scheduled to travel within the ACC this fall with trips to Georgia Tech, Wake Forest, Florida State and Boston College, which is the longest trip Clemson ever has to make in the conference at 966 miles.
With the addition of USC and UCLA, the Big Ten now has nine institutions that are more than 700 miles away from Clemson. One of the non-California schools (Iowa) is more than 900 miles away while two others (Minnesota and Nebraska) would each be trips in excess of 1,100 miles.
And if Clemson has to make the trek to Los Angeles or Pasadena every other year, which would be likely if the Big Ten adopts a rotating schedule or pod system, the distances would double. The Rose Bowl, where UCLA plays its home games, is 2,292 miles away while USC’s Coliseum would be a 2,303-mile trip.
Of the two most likely moves Clemson would make to another conference, jumping to the Big Ten would easily be the more taxing and expensive one from a travel standpoint.
Note: The distances for this story were calculated in miles from Memorial Stadium in Clemson to each opponent’s stadium using the shortest route shown in Apple Maps. They also assumed driving as the mode of transportation. Flying would slightly alter the distances.
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