The 2024 college football season will kick off with the new-look ACC. This season, the conference welcomes California, Stanford and SMU, and it will be a grueling travel schedule across the country for all of its teams.
With the conference now playing on both coasts and somewhere in between, the travel will skyrocket and the football schools will be overwhelmed. Earlier this week, I wrote that Stanford and UC had crazy travel schedules, which makes sense given the expansion from East to West Coast. But how far will the schools travel for football this fall?
247Sports’ Grant Hughes ranked ACC schools based on travel, but where did Virginia Tech land in the rankings?
Virginia Tech ranks ninth in the ACC in terms of travel distance next season, with 8,443 miles traveled, putting it near the middle of Hughes’ rankings.
“Virginia Tech will face the toughest competition in the ACC next season. The Hokies will embark on a 912.1-mile journey to Miami on Friday, Sept. 27, then rush back to Blacksburg and fly 2,691.7 miles to Stanford on Saturday, Oct. 5. Including round trip travel, they will travel more than 7,000 miles in nine days.”
– Grant Hughes
Hughes was right: the Hokies face their toughest turnaround yet this fall, traveling to South Florida to play Miami on a Friday night and then playing Stanford eight days later, which will eat up the majority of their travel time for the entire season.
This season, Virginia Tech will travel to Vanderbilt to open the season in Nashville, then play Marshall at home before playing at Old Dominion. In addition to Miami and Stanford, Syracuse and Duke are the four ACC destinations on the road. A bright spot in the Hokies’ schedule this season is that they will finish the season by playing four games on the road in the first six weeks, before playing four of their final six games.
Clemson has not traveled to the West Coast this season and has traveled the least distance at 2,472 miles, while Virginia has traveled the second-least at 3,151 miles. With the new scheduling model the conference is now adopting, those numbers will even out as the season progresses. For Virginia Tech, the first six weeks of the season will be its toughest road trip on the road.
