OK, The Big Ten has taken a lot of heat regarding its bowl record in the recent years. I stopped counting how many BCS games Ohio State has lost. This year Penn State was beaten convincingly by USC and MSU, Minnesota and Wisconsin were never really in their games either. The conference's only bowl win was buy Iowa over South Carolina at the Outback Bowl. One win and six losses altogether. Now, I'll be the first to tell you that you just need to win. Bad calls, bad weather, bad luck, too bad. But it seemed this year there was a lot of piling on by the talking heads saying just how bad The Big Ten was; how the conference was irrelevant, uncompetitive and outmatched by the other leagues. My first thought was- yeah but Big Ten schools travel way, way farther to get to the bowls they play in and in some cases to play at their opponents' home field. It's no excuse for stinking up the bowls but at the very least, it's a reason why these guys need to lay off a solid conference.The Big Ten as a conference travels farther than anyone else and plays opponents that are less traveled than anyone else. On average, Big Ten schools traveled 2.07 times farther than every other team. The next most traveled conference, The Big East traveled 60% as far as The Big Ten. In terms of opponents travel distance, The ACC's was lowest but is virtually the same as The Big Ten; only a 4% difference. As you may well imagine, The Big Ten also enjoys the largest average travel differential with its opponents.
So what? Well, as it happens the travel ratio of the two opponents is a fairly good indicator of the ratio of the teams' final scores. Better than membership in any conference with the exception of The Pac 10 which went 6-0 in bowls. However, Pac 10 teams also traveled less than their opponent for every bowl with the exception of Arizona which traveled ever so slightly farther to play BYU in The Las Vegas Bowl. If you remove two outliers from the data (including Notre Dame that traveled to Hawaii to deal The Warriors a 49-21 smack-down on their home field and LSU which beat Georgia Tech 38-3 at The Georgia Dome) the effect of travel becomes undeniable. This is probably best shown in this graph:
-click graph for larger view-On the X-axis, anything less than one is a team that traveled less than its opponent. Notice the abundance of victories, particularly large victories by the team playing closer to home. And as we move along the X-axis, wins become sparser and closer.
Until, they start playing bowl games in places like Madison, Wisconsin, or Evanston, Illinois, it doesn't seem that Big Ten schools are going to get a break on holiday travel. Clearly, they need to get better at playing far from home. I don't have any suggestions in that department. As for everyone that says The Big Ten is irrelevant based on recent bowl performance... lay off.
