The Long Road to the 2024 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 Detroit (should they make it that far³).
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 341,788 which is up 2% (7,898) miles from 2022 should they all decide to meet in Glendale 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. First a look at the average distance traveled by seed:

Longest overall journey to the Final Four: Charleston, with a first round game in Spokane, then a potential return to the west coast in LA for the Sweet 16, then, ideally for Cougars fans, back all the way to Phoenix/Glendale for the Final Four. All of this brings the total travel of 10,653 miles to get to the Final Four. Here’s the map:

Shortest overall journey to the Final Four: Long Beach State. Well, at least the coach of Long Beach State, who has already agreed to terminate his contract with the university, won’t have to go very far. From Long Beach to Salt Lake City, then, should they make it to the Sweet 16, a journey that might take longer than the flight to SLC in a 23 mile drive up The 110, then out east to Glendale. Not too bad at all:

Longest journey to the Final Four for a 1 seed: North Carolina, who at 6,628 miles, will travel three times as far as the shortest traveling 1 seed (Purdue).

Shortest journey to the Final Four for a 16 seed: Grambling, 4,176 miles. Even with the extra stop in Dayton!

Average journey by region: South (4,206), Midwest (4,735), East (5,474), West (5,733)

Seed with shortest average journey: Two seed with an average of 3,107 miles. Largely on the back of four middle-of-the-country teams.

Seed with longest average journey: 13, averaging 7,231 miles. Charleston, Vermont, Yale, and Samford are too busy hanging around on the edge of the country

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

Full results by team:

1. UConn making it to both New York and Boston before a potential trip to Glendale
2. Covington*
3. Please please please God just let me have this