Interesting Article on B10 Travel Schedules - How will UCF manage this?

AGLamb · Aug 1, 2023

USC, UCLA and the race to solve the Big Ten's toughest travel puzzle

What the two L.A. schools will experience once they enter the Big Ten on Aug. 2, 2024, will be unprecedented in major college sports.

theathletic.com

whole thing is really interesting but the striking part is the money they are able to spend that we won't have. here's an example of the logistical hurdles they face and how they're trying to solve this:

The Big Ten unveiled its 2024 football scheduling model earlier this summer. The Flex Protect Plus, as the league is calling it, allows teams to play up to three protected rivals each year and rotates through the rest of the conference while trying to prioritize competitive balance. But football only plays once a week. It’s going to take more creativity to piece together not just the soccer schedule but also the slate for field hockey, cross country and everything else that will be in-season at the same time.

For example, maybe the league can pair UCLA men’s soccer with USC women’s volleyball, and the two teams could charter together to play Northwestern and Illinois on the same weekend. Alternatively, they could fly commercial together and share buses. One other example of the minutiae of these travel considerations: In this scenario, the order of the L.A. teams’ games should be Illinois, followed by Northwestern. That way, those teams would end up much closer to O’Hare International Airport and could fly home directly after the games.

“How do you take advantage of members that are close by each other?” Petitti said. “You can double up and alternate. We’re also thinking about the size of our postseason formats. … One of the things I’ve tried to do — my philosophy overall — is that playing for a Big Ten championship is incredibly meaningful. So, for those sports where we have postseason Big Ten play, what’s the best way to like prioritize that? And then we have to have the regular season work.

example of the resources they can throw at this problem:

UCLA athletes asked for more resources devoted to their nutrition and to their mental health. “It was glaringly apparent to me that, resource-wise, we weren’t where we needed to be,” Jarmond said. The Bruins are already trying to address that by adding meals on campus and team meals on the road. By the time UCLA gets to the Big Ten, Elliott said every athlete on campus will have breakfast and lunch served to them, which he noted was a big change for the athletic department. No more cards for meal plans or trying to run back to a dining hall in between classes. It’ll be baked into the schedule. On the road, instead of per diems, there will be more team meals; nutritionists and dieticians can make sure the athletes are fueling properly.

They also plan to increase staffing for both mental health and academic support. Academic advisors will travel with teams. Additional support ideas could include noise-cancelling headphones for all athletes, and maybe Wi-Fi hotspots, too, to make it easier to do schoolwork while traveling. Elliott suggested that athletes might also want to take more summer classes, so their schedules are a bit lighter and more flexible in-season.

Barbour highlighted USC’s sports science efforts, which she said will help athletes with nutrition and sleep optimization. They’ll also help figure out best practices for air travel — how best to help athletes prepare and recover in a pressurized environment. The Trojans are trying to approach everything around the transition with a student-centered focus.

all this stuff costs a fortune and they're making 3x our tv money when our tv money actually kicks in. we were talking money on the realignment thread a few dozen pages ago and i have this theory all this new b12 cash aint gonna go as far as we hope it will in terms of infrastructure etc. we already had a weird travel schedule with the AAC but at least our teams could fly direct to many (all?) of those destinations.

tl;dr UCLA should just pay their in house brainiacs to build an AI program that they can use to input all the sports, locations, timelines for each sport season and parameters around divisions / schedules etc and let the AI come up with the optimal way to map everyone's travel

DBuckingham · Aug 1, 2023