Today's Tidbit... Football Travel Times In The Nineteen Aughts

With USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington joining the Big Ten and other changes in conference affiliations, teams located far from the geographic center of their new conferences face long travel distances and times. The anticipated travel has brought criticism, especially from coaches in sports that compete several days per week. Of course, those coaches already take their teams to Maui or the Bahamas for tournaments and play mid-week away games throughout the season. Likewise, baseball and track teams in northern climes head south or west four or five weekends each spring to compete in more favorable conditions.

However, since Football Archaeology is about football's old days, reviewing the travel itineraries and times faced by football teams competing about 120 years ago seemed appropriate. To do so, I picked a mixed bag of college teams and examined their travel arrangements for their longer trips.

During the first decade of the 20th Century, teams representing state flagship universities or others playing big-time football played most games at home and mostly faced lesser teams from the same or border states. They did not go far when they traveled. Wisconsin, for example, played only one game outside its home and border states until 1907. Other schools showed similar patterns, with variations driven by each state's geographic size and density of nearby colleges. Travel to distant locations was by train, often at slow speeds with multiple connections. Playing mid-season games in neutral, central city locations was relatively common because those cities provided larger spectator pools and train connections for both teams and their fans.

So, let's look at a few games and the visiting teams' travel arrangements. Trips of more than 200 miles often took a full day or more, requiring a night on the train or a hotel along the way.