College football realignment: Cal will travel 83% of Earth's distance in miles in 2024

The latest round of college football conference realignment will wreak havoc on travel, especially for West Coast teams now playing in East Coast leagues.

College football realignment made the ACC a West Coast conference after adding Cal, which will travel a very long way in 2024. / Robert Edwards-USA TODAY Sports

College football realignment has made strange bedfellows as teams are forced to form alliances with other teams well out of their traditional geographic area, and the ACC is not exempt from that fact.

Especially as regards newcomer Cal, which, in its five road games away from Berkeley this season, will travel a distance that nearly rivals that of the Earth itself.

That's right: Cal will travel a combined 20,720 miles to and from its five road games this football season, with four of those matchups coming in the East.

That number is not only the most in the ACC, but it's just 4,180 miles short of the entire circumference of our planet, meaning Cal will travel up to 83.2 percent of the way around the world in terms of mileage over the course of this football season.

Auburn: 4,196 round-trip miles
Florida State: 4,440 miles
Pittsburgh: 4,512 miles
Wake Forest: 4,618 miles
SMU: 2,954 miles

Cal will travel an average of 4,132 miles and cross 26 total time zones in its voyages to and from road games this season.

And, in the apparently unlikely event that Cal qualifies for the ACC Championship Game, that would add another 4,586 miles to the team's travel schedule with the round trip to Charlotte, NC.

Cal wasn't the only team to join the ACC in this year's historic conference expansion efforts. The league also added West Coast school, and Cal rival, Stanford, as well as SMU, based in the Dallas, Texas, suburb of University Park.

Stanford will travel an estimated 14,017 miles, second-most in the ACC, with road dates against Syracuse and Clemson, in consecutive weeks no less, with a trip to Notre Dame soon after and to NC State two weeks after that.

But the Cardinal is spared somewhat with late road games against Cal and San Jose State, which are much closer to home in northern California.

Schools like Cal needed to make a move in conference realignment in order to stay competitive on the financial front, and that extra revenue should come in handy when it comes to paying for all these trips across the country.

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