For decades, Alabama athletes have had to travel fewer miles to reach road contests around the SEC than any other team in the league. Encircled by at least one SEC campus in every direction, UA was uniquely positioned as the league's geographic center, resulting in road trips that were, on average, shorter than any other school. That didn't change when South Carolina and Arkansas joined the SEC in 1992, and it was still the case after the league added Missouri and Texas A&M in 2012.
A year ago, when the SEC was a 14-team league, the Crimson Tide could get to every campus and back in an SEC-low 8,051 miles. But the latest round of SEC expansion, which welcomes Texas and Oklahoma beginning this fall, has resulted in a slight shift in the league's travel epicenter.
Move over, Alabama . The SEC's centermost campus is now in Starkville, Miss.
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Going forward, Mississippi State will travel a total of 10,289 round-trip miles to get to the other 15 SEC campuses, the fewest of any school. Ole Miss isn't far behind with the second-shortest travel (10,440 miles), while Alabama now has the third-shortest total (10,479 miles). Those are negligible differences, but gap between travel for MSU, Ole Miss and Alabama and the SEC's outermost campuses is anything but negligible.
Newcomer Texas is facing the most travel with a total of 19,346 round-trip miles to reach every SEC campus, 9,057 more than MSU. Its expansion brother, Oklahoma, has the second-toughest travel plan at 17,262 miles.
The dig on this exercise required a calculation of distance traveled between every SEC campus, with three exceptions: the annual neutral-site contests of Florida-Georgia (in Jacksonville, Fla.), Texas A&M-Arkansas (in Arlington, Tex.) and Texas-Oklahoma (in Dallas). Those three games involve shorter trips for all involved. But even though Texas and OU meet each other in the middle, the Longhorns and Sooners will still travel the farthest of any SEC school.
The longest-single game trip in the league will involve Texas and South Carolina, who won't clash in football any sooner than 2026, at a whopping 2,022 round-trip miles.
Sorry, but I'll never again be able to listen to SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey boast that the SEC is the only power conference with a "contiguous footprint" — meaning that every SEC state borders at least one other SEC state — without cracking a grin. The SEC footprint still doesn't approach the lunacy of the newly-expanded ACC and Big Ten, which now feature schools on both coasts. That ACC hop from Boston College to Stanford is going to be a marathon of almost 5,500 round-trip air miles.
But make no mistake: SEC travel is taking a major leap.
Six campus-to-campus trips, with five of them involving either Texas or OU, will clock in at more than 1,800 miles. The only previous such trip: Texas A&M to South Carolina (1,848). The aggregate league-wide mileage total last year, among 14 schools, was 151,360 miles. Throw in Texas and Oklahoma as SEC's new geographic outliers, and going forward, the total jumps to 223,868, an increase of 67%.
Brings a new appreciation to Alabama's 80-mile bus ride to Mississippi State, doesn't it?
Tuscaloosa News columnist Chase Goodbread is also the weekly co-host of Crimson Cover TV on WVUA-23. Reach him at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on X.com @chasegoodbread.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Alabama football once enjoyed SEC"s fewest travel miles, but no longer
