One bone of contention many fans—particularly those on the East coast—have revolves around how much their team travels. They cite that late West coast starts on Sunday and Monday night games are too great a disadvantage. When the NFL releases its season schedule, prognosticators will undoubtedly consider travel time when forecasting a team’s win-loss record.
Matt Zajechowski and our friends at Carey.com developed this interactive map that they shared with us and we are happy to share with our readers, which you can see below. The map shows the travel distance for each team in the NFL, which should help put a few things in perspective.
Here are some notes:
- San Francisco—the league’s most well traveled—logged more than four times that of Philadelphia
- nine teams have traveled more than 10,000 miles and only one one (Arizona) is currently above .500
- in each of the last two season (2014, 2014), seven of the nine teams who travel 10,000 miles plus have had winning seasons
An article from Huffington Post detailed a project from Stanford, Harvard and University of California, San Diego with these findings regarding circadian timing between the 1970s and 2011:
- “Professional football players playing close to the circadian peak in performance demonstrate a significant athletic advantage over those who are playing at other times.” (SLEEP Study)
- point spread beaten in 66% of games by West Cost teams when they played East Coast teams after 8 p.m. ET.
- West coast teams beat point spread by average of over 5 points per game
A Stanford study appearing in Deadspin regarding Monday Night Football over the past 25 years found that:
- West Coast teams won 63% of the time
- Margin of victory was an average of 14 points
What does this mean? Basically, when played during the day, there is little effect regarding the distance a team has to travel based on records. Further, there is a significant enough advantage for West coast teams when playing night games, which should be strongly considered by schedule-makers—which it is already.
Travel Distance of Every NFL Team 2015
Main Photo via Getty Images Sport
