How Stanford and Its West Coast Brethren Planned for Long Road Trips in Conference Realignment

Academic task forces, sleep experts and technology that improves blood flow on long flights have all been part of the preparations for four California schools gearing up for travel in the ACC and Big Ten.

Four West Coast teams are traveling further than ever following conference realignment. / Bob Drebin/ISI Photos

PALO ALTO, Calif.—If you invite Matt Doyle to a wedding, or a speaking engagement, or a youth soccer game, understand one thing: He will be taking mental notes. He will case the joint, scan your plan and internally deconstruct your logistics.

It’s not an intentional critique as much as a reflexive response. Now in his 25th year at Stanford, the senior associate athletic director for football operations and player development is hardwired to study large gatherings and event dynamics. Organizing, moving, feeding and entertaining herds of people is not just his job, it’s an obsession he doesn’t easily turn off. 

Doyle is a classic, notepad-on-the-bed stand guy, waking up at odd hours to jot down an idea or a reminder. If an August practice ends 12 minutes earlier than scheduled, it is noted and entered into a database for future reference. This is how you survive working with six different head coaches, Jim Harbaugh prominently included.

“An acute level of organization,” Doyle says, sitting at his desk in the Arrillaga Family Sports Center, staring at an itinerary on his computer screen for an upcoming football road trip. “You owe that attention to detail to your colleagues and the athletes.”

Doyle’s acute level of organization has been tested, because the road trips are different now—for football and every other Stanford sport. They’re longer and often more complex. There are new opponents, new destinations, new hotels and bus routes and meal caterers. New time zones. New challenges in terms of missed classes and missed sleep.

The reason why flutters in a hot August breeze about 200 yards from Doyle’s office. 

There are 12 flag poles near Stanford Stadium, in the heart of the athletic footprint on this spectacular campus. For years, those poles flew the flags of the members of the Pac-12 Conference. Today, they carry 10 flags with the Stanford logo in alternating cardinal and white, flanked by ones at either end that bear the letters “ACC.”

It is a jarring representation of a new reality.

Stanford and fellow Bay Area school California are now cross-country commuting to the Atlantic Coast Conference. Los Angeles schools USC and UCLA have wandered off to the Big Ten, as have Pacific Northwest outposts Oregon and Washington. It makes no sense geographically, but the financial pressures of major-college athletics have dictated seismic change that has taken effect in 2024.

Gone are relatively short flights to major airports up and down the West Coast. Gone is minimal time change, when the furthest east anyone went for a league game was Boulder, Colo. Gone are the familiar rhythms of trips in several sports to compete against two nearby conference opponents in a single weekend.

At Stanford and Cal, this realignment was not a desired development. But it sure beat the alternative of being discarded to the power-conference remainder bin like Oregon State and Washington State, both of which are struggling to remain viable and are targeting four Mountain West schools in order to rebuild the Pac-12. For several weeks in August 2023, that was a looming possibility for the Bay Area schools before the ACC invitation materialized.

“My first thought was, ‘Thank God we’re somewhere,’ ” Stanford volleyball coach Kevin Hambly says. “I mean, it was sad to see what happened to the Pac-12, which was a great conference. It’s so hard to see that just dissolve.

“But we have a home. So there was a lot of gratitude for that, first and foremost. Then it was more about making a plan. We can’t change anything, so let’s just figure out how to manage this the best we possibly can.”

At Stanford, a task force was created to study—and preempt—adverse academic impacts for athletes at the prestigious educational institution. At UCLA, a travel review board was created to ensure road trips were as consistent as possible across sports. At Cal, a sleep expert spoke about managing athlete rest at an athletic department retreat.

The schools have compared notes and held conference calls with each other to discuss best practices—but until now, it’s all been theory. Now it’s time to put the show on the long and winding road.

“All of us have an idea what we want to do, but it’s not something we’ve been through before,” Cal senior associate athletic director Josh Hummel says. “So we’ll adjust on the fly. It’s exciting. It’s also daunting.”

Daunting logistically and financially. West Coast schools going into the Big Ten are projecting an additional $3 million to $3.5 million in travel expenses, per sources—for the regular season alone. Postseason championships, which are more numerous in the Big Ten than in the Pac-12, could add another $1 million to the bill. ACC cost increases likely won’t be too much lower.

“It’s more expensive,” Hummel says. “Much more expensive.”

With the collapse of the Pac-12, Horace Greeley’s 1800s exhortation has been turned backward. Go East, young men and young women. And hope for the best.

But as the saying goes, hope is not a strategy. Instead, the West Coast schools have spent a year cooking up concrete plans for their new reality. It has been a consuming, sometimes exhausting but also energizing task. If you want to use one word to define the outlook for the California quadrant now that this new competition season is here, it would be this: enthusiasm.

“We’re going to be tested, which is what we want,” Stanford athletic director Bernard Muir says. “We’re excited to get going. We’re grateful where we landed. It’s a great opportunity to showcase what we’ve been about over the years.”

Stanford swimmer Torri Huske (right) won gold at the Paris Olympics. / Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated

Stanford has been the literal and figurative gold standard for all-sports excellence for decades. The Cardinal have won the most NCAA championships of any school, 136. Stanford has won the Learfield Directors’ Cup as the top all-around athletic program 26 times in the award’s 30-year history. Per NCAA tabulations, current and former Stanford athletes won 34 medals at the Paris Olympics this summer, doubling runner-up Cal.

In fall sports, Stanford currently is ranked No. 1 nationally in women’s soccer, No. 2 in women’s volleyball, No. 3 in men’s soccer, No. 7 in women’s cross country and No. 10 in men’s cross country. Now comes the challenge of ensuring that excellence travels—at greater distances than ever before. 

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The trip itinerary on Matt Doyle’s computer screen in August is at hand next week: The Cardinal are making their Atlantic Coast Conference debut on Sept. 20, at Syracuse. The following week, Stanford will visit Clemson.

Of all the hands realigning schools have been dealt, this is the single worst one in football. None of the other Pac-12 diaspora—in the ACC, Big Ten or Big 12—will play league road games on consecutive weeks. And these are three-time-zone sojourns of 5,000 miles or more round trip.

That’s not ideal, but schedule-making in a 17-team conference is an arduous task. Moving a single game can be like pulling out the wrong block in the Jenga tower. Everything can collapse. There’s no way to keep everyone happy.

So the back-to-back long flights will be planned out in detail to minimize discomfort. Bigger planes will be used. Linemen will get aisle and window seats, with open seats between them. Many of the players will wear firefly devices on their legs, a pulse technology that improves blood flow. Normatec gear will be on hand for further leg stimulation. Hydration will be fanatically monitored.

“Control everything we can control,” Doyle says.

Stanford football’s ACC schedule opens with back-to-back games on the East Coast. / Sergio Estrada-Imagn Images

One scheduling advantage Stanford can offer to the ACC and UCLA can offer to the Big Ten is their academic calendars. Both are on quarter systems, which means the fall quarters start later: Stanford begins class instruction Sept. 23; UCLA on Sept. 26. And at Stanford, students can “shop” classes for the first week before deciding in which they want to enroll.

That makes the first three weeks of September a great time to schedule road games. Leaving Wednesday to play Syracuse on Friday is not a problem for the Cardinal, nor is UCLA’s nonconference game at LSU on Sept. 21. 

The same is true in other sports. UCLA makes a men’s soccer road swing to Northwestern and Wisconsin in the coming days, while women’s soccer visits Indiana and Purdue next week before school is in session. Stanford women’s soccer opens ACC play at Wake Forest and North Carolina State from Sept. 19 to 22, returning home for the start of class the following day. Field hockey is making a three-match road swing from Sept. 18 to 22. Volleyball plays a splashy, Wednesday game next week at Nebraska that will be televised on Big Ten Network.

In terms of future scheduling, the schools could even request a two-for-one football road trip from their league offices before school starts. Example: Stanford playing back-to-back weekends on Tobacco Road and staying in the area between games. Ideally, West Coast schools will continue to conclude the season with games against their regional brethren.

But given some of the high-maintenance dynamics in both conferences (Florida State and Clemson suing the ACC; Michigan refusing to play Friday games in the Big Ten), the new guys are not coming in making demands.

“The ACC has been great to work with,” Doyle says. “No complaints.”

No complaints, but Stanford did get the toughest draw. Playing Friday at Syracuse adds an extra day of cushion before embarking again for Clemson, but with a 7:30 p.m. ET kickoff, getting back (via charter) to Palo Alto before 4 a.m. PT on Sept. 21 seems unlikely. After the cross-country flight, the Cardinal face a 30-minute bus ride from the San Francisco airport to campus.

The Clemson trip still isn’t even finalized, because a kickoff time has not been announced. The logistics there are particularly difficult, because the team won’t stay in Clemson itself and cannot quickly leave the stadium for a nearby airport. Stanford is staying in Greenville, S.C., and flying in and out of that airport, roughly 45 miles from Clemson’s isolated campus.

Doyle says there is an NCAA rule mandating a day off for any team that arrives back on campus later than 5 a.m. the day following a competition. Just in case the Clemson game is at night, Stanford has already filed for a waiver to that rule that would at least allow some work to be done Sunday in preparation for the next game, at home against Virginia Tech. Mondays are the team’s usual day off for football players.

Each Stanford football road trip east is essentially a three-to-four-day investment—leaving two days before the game and returning at an hour that could wipe out the day after the game. In addition to the back-to-back dates this month, Stanford also travels to Notre Dame in October for a nonconference game and to North Carolina State in November.

The final two away games are in Stanford’s backyard: at Cal on Nov. 23 and at San Jose State on Nov. 29. How much will the other road trips have taken out of the Cardinal by then? Nobody knows yet.

While the other West Coast schools avoided the back-to-back travel whammy, there still are cumulative effect concerns in the Big Ten. Oregon makes three long trips in five weeks: at Purdue on Oct. 18, at Michigan on Nov. 2 and at Wisconsin on Nov. 16. So do USC (at Michigan on Sept. 21, at Minnesota on Oct. 5 and at Maryland on Oct. 19) and UCLA (at Penn State on Oct. 5, at Rutgers on Oct. 19 and at Nebraska on Nov. 2). Washington has four in seven weeks (at Rutgers on Sept. 27, at Iowa on Oct. 12, at Indiana on Oct. 26 and at Penn State on Nov. 9).

There is research indicating that NFL teams traveling from the West Coast fare progressively worse against the point spread the farther they go east. On the other hand, the first major trip east this year by a West Coast college team resulted in Cal scoring a major upset at Auburn last Saturday. That did not go unnoticed—or uncelebrated—elsewhere in California.

If the Golden Bears can cross time zones and win big games, why not the Cardinal, Trojans and Bruins?

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Football is the focus, of course. It is both the root cause of the realignment problem and also the revenue-producing salvation for the rest of the affected athletic departments. But the real challenges for West Coast teams will come in the other sports.

They play more games, and they play more of those games during the week. Trips are longer and more school may be missed—most of it on the front end. Jet lag (both coming and going) can be more pronounced over a period of four or five days. And chartered flights, which are routine for football and men’s basketball—and, in some cases, women’s basketball—will be rare.

But just about every Stanford fall sport has assessed their ACC schedules and deemed them manageable. Whether that’s an attitude-based or fact-based determination is open to debate, but the initial blowback from media and fans about the extreme logistical challenges might not be that bad, upon closer inspection.

For teams that have endured the fickle weather and remote location of Pullman, Wash., can trips to Winston-Salem, N.C., be that much worse?

“Honestly, the flight times when we leave and the flight times when we come home, it’s kind of the same because every time we lose hours going, we gain them back coming back,” Hambly says. “When we started looking at flights, we were like, ‘This isn’t that bad. Are we losing our minds?’

“So now ask me in December when we’ve gone through it. But in theory, the trips aren’t that much different.”

Hambly requested, and was granted, a charter flight home from the showdown with No. 5 Nebraska next week, because the Cardinal will host No. 10 Kentucky three days later. Field hockey coach Roz Ellis did the same for the commute from a match at Louisville on Sept. 20 to one at Virginia on Sept. 22. That’s a seven-hour drive and there are no direct commercial flights, so Muir signed off on that as well.

“You walk in and you’re like, ‘This is what I need,’ ” Ellis says. “And they understood. So I’m really grateful for that.”

A general view of Stanford Stadium with the new ACC logos adorning the field. / Sergio Estrada-Imagn Images

But there will be some serious bus rides coming for the Cardinal as well. The ACC has travel partners, but not all of them are overly proximate. Example: women’s soccer plays a night match at Louisville on Thursday, Oct. 17, and an afternoon match at Notre Dame on Sunday, Oct. 20. It’s a 4½-hour drive between them, so the team will bus to Indianapolis and stay there and then fly out of Chicago after the match against the Fighting Irish.

One of the key elements of almost all the Olympic sport schedules in the Big Ten and ACC for West Coast teams is early competitions on Sundays, at the end of a two-game road trip. That, plus flying back to the Pacific Time Zone, allows for travel home so athletes can sleep in their own beds that night.

But many of those will be late nights, with teams often getting back to campus around midnight Sunday. After missed class time on the front end of the trip, athletes will have no choice but to be up and ready to go at elite academic schools on Monday mornings. Academic support staff will make trips with some teams, especially at heavy workload times such as midterm exams. Hotel meeting rooms are useful for study sessions or proctoring tests that have to be taken at certain dates and times.

Coaches have been drilling their athletes on communicating with professors in advance about trip schedules and working assignments around absences. Athletes at these schools tend to be accomplished multitaskers, but the demands have never been greater than now.

The academic grind also is why schools have leaned into sleep research in an effort to make sure athletes are as rested as possible. Hambly said he’s emphasizing the need for sunlight for his players while they’re on the road. Mike Davis, director of operations for Stanford women’s soccer, said the team will utilize a buddy system to help players regulate their sleep schedules to new time zones. 

“We want them to stay awake on planes so they’re ready to sleep when they land when we’re going east,” he says. “We want to make sure they’re tired at the right time.”

The toll a season of planes, trains and automobiles will take isn’t yet known. But the West Coast teams do know this: A bunch of opponents from the Midwest and East Coast also have long trips to make, and jet lag works both ways.

Whatever trepidation existed at Stanford, Cal, UCLA and USC over the past 12 to 24 months about the massive changes facing them, it’s gone now. It’s time to compete, to earn new stripes in new leagues, to prove that those who left the Conference of Champions can still be champions in new conferences. 

“We’re here to rattle the cage,” Ellis says, “and the longer we’re in the conference, the bigger the rattle will be.”