The Long Road to the 2022 Final Four: How Far Will Each NCAA Tournament Team Have to Travel?

We’ve heard it before: The Road to the Final Four is long and painful.  But exactly how long is it?  For some of the teams, it seems like they always get opening round games right down the road¹.  For the rest of us, it seems like our team has to cross nine time zones to even get to the Sweet 16. Well, I did the work so you didn’t have to. Using some base assumptions, I plugged in the numbers to see who, exactly, has the longest way still to go.  The answer may surprise you.

Assumptions:

1. During the NCAA tournament, the NCAA itself charters aircraft to bring teams to games. I assume that they generally use the closest reasonable airport. In major metro areas I tend to use the “major” airport, but I realize that Cincinnati might fly out of Lunken Field instead of Cincinnati² International Airport, the numbers do not materially change.  I promise, I tested.  When I did this for 2018’s Major League Baseball season, people got really mad about this. I re-ran the numbers and they changed by less than .01%, so settle down.
2. Given that for under 350 miles teams are bused, this assumes the point to point distance (as the crow flies) rather than road distance on shorter journeys. This is done to maintain apples-to-apples comparisons.
3. Play-in teams will NOT go home after Dayton, but proceed to the next stop on their journey.  For the rest of the venues, once they advance through their region, they will go home on Saturday or Sunday and fly on to the next region the following Wednesday or whatever.  So in this example, Purdue goes home after Indianapolis and after Philadelphia (should they make it that far).
4. Since this is mileage TO the Final Four, I don’t consider a trip home. That would be some different article that’s less interesting.

Okay, enough assumptions!

Results:

In total, all 68 teams would travel 333,890 miles (which is up 10% (30,922) miles from 2019 should they all decide to meet in New Orleans and watch each other, and it would look like this:

Unfortunately for 64 of them, that’s not how it will work. Here are some individual statistics. The average First a look at the average distance traveled by seed:

Longest overall journey to the Final Four: Rutgers, with a play-in game in Dayton, then immediately out to San Diego before potentially having to go all the way back to Newark before headed all the way back to San Francisco. All of this plus the trip to New Orleans brings the total travel of 10,766 miles to get to the Final Four. Here’s the map:

Shortest overall journey to the Final Four: Wisconsin. Who could’ve seen this one coming after the Badgers got put in the Milwaukee Pod and the Chicago Regional. This journey looks a lot less challenging than their Big Ten counterpart Rutgers’s’s’s:

Longest journey to the Final Four for a 1 seed: Gonzaga, who at 3,915 miles, will travel only one and a half times as far as the shortest traveling 1 seed (Kansas).

Shortest journey to the Final Four for a 16 seed: Norfolk State, 3,788 miles. One can dream, can they not?.

Average journey by region: Midwest (3,738), South (4,525), East (4,826), West (6,551)

Seed with shortest average journey: Three seed with an average of 2,883 miles. Largely on the back of Wisconsin being the overall #1 as well as Purdue’s short journey.

Seed with longest average journey: 16, averaging 6,450 miles. Thanks to play-in games and some really far west pods this year

Here’s the raw data so you can see how your team stacks up…

Full results by team:

1. Duke has to go ALL THE WAY TO SAN FRANCISCO THIS YEAR, WOOHOO
2. Covington*