CompEngineer97

To answer the first question, they don't need people to travel. Southern California has a lot of everything, including transplants. There are more than 20,000 Michigan alumni and alumnae alone, not counting the people who grew up rooting for Michigan, because they are the children of transplants, etc. You will find similar numbers for the other schools, and the local alumni associations are chomping at the bit to see their teams at the Coli and the Rose Bowl. As to the second, the other teams still want the exposure, and the coaches still want to recruit in Southern California. It's fairly common for teams to participate in other conferences when their primary conference does not have a sport in which they participate. For a long time, volleyball fell under the MPSF, not the Pac-10/12. If you have learned anything from the recent media negotiations it should be that you would be effectively cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Well everyone is entitled to their opinion, even you. As I've already mentioned, the athletes in non-revenue sports will see a substantial decrease in overall travel time by being able to take charter flights directly to their opponents rather than waiting around LAX and taking either connections or long bus trips. The simple fact is that the Pac was already spread out enough that the LA schools' athletes basicallly had to fly, except maybe to the Arizona schools (about a 4 hr ride). Even the bay area schools were half a day or so in the car. For every trip that will be longer (e.g. taking a charter flight to Maryland or Rutgers) there will be several that will be shorter (e.g. not having to take a couple commercial flights to WSU, Colorado, Oregon State, or Oregon) Only Washington, Utah, and the bay area schools are located near major cities that made direct flights possible . If USC/UCLA build a midwest satellite facility, it will offer far more resources than a hotel for road trips, and again all the extra revenue insures training and equipment will always be state-of-the-art and the coaches will be some of the best compensated, so they will be able to lure the best from all over the country, no matter how much the coaching arms race heats up. The athletes will be on a national, rather than regional stage. Some will appreciate that and won't mind the time on airplanes. Others won't, will look elsewhere and that's fine too.

Time change is a factor in jet lag only when one needs to actually adjust to imposed schedules of the local environment. In other words, if you travel halfway around the world on vacation, you will want to adjust your sleep schedule so that as a tourist you can be awake when most sights are open. It stands to reason that when USC hosts Big Ten opponents, their games will be played in the early afternoon, but when USC travels to Big Ten games, they will play in the late afternoon/early evening, so as to accommodate TV audiences across both teams' respective time zones. Thus, there is little need to adjust the body clocks of the players for a short road trip.Just let them practice, go to sleep, and wake up later. The chief causes of jet lag have little to do with the time zone, namely oxygen deprivation from exposure to reduced atmospheric pressure and dehydration from being in an almost humidity-free environment. Anyone who has flown the 787, even over great distances across multiple time zones, immediately notices how little jet lag they experience, because the carbon fiber air frame supports higher air pressure and humidity. I wouldn't expect athletes at the peak of their physical perfotmance to be too much more affected than they already are, since as I've already shown, flight times will only slightly increase and (in the case of non-revenue sports) total travel times will likely decrease.

I know. The benefit will be felt by all the OTHER teams besides football and basketball that currently do NOT fly charter.

Interesting topic. If I may weigh in from the other side, I don't think the teams will regret it as much as some people think. First, you have to consider that flight times vs. distances do not scale linearly, like drive times typically do. A flight path is dictated by fuel consumption more than anything, and the most fuel/second is burned during the takeoff and climb out phases of the flight, when the engines are at full throttle. Once a flight reaches its cruising altitude, the pilot is able to dial the engines back a bit. For longer flights, the pilot will thus trade more fuel consumption and a longer climb phase for a higher cruise altitude, where the fuel savings will occur, but because the flight is cruising at higher altitude where the air is thinner, the aircraft's relative ground speed will be higher. To put real numbers behind this, look at a direct flight between LAX and Seattle-Tacoma. The distance is 830 nautical miles, and the commercial flight time is 2 hrs 45 min. A similarly direct commercial flight between LAX and Chicago O'Hare covers 1516 nautical miles, almost double the distance, but only takes about 38% more time (3 hrs 48 minutes total). Again, the general rule is that the further you fly, the higher and faster you fly. For the two examples given, it would be an average ground speed of 302 knots vs. 399 knots. But the added flight time only tells part of the story, because one thing those schools will now be able to do with the surplus cash is charter private flights for all their teams, not just in the revenue sports. This makes a HUGE difference when your base hub is one of the five busiest airports in the world. If you are flying commercially out of LAX, you need to pad at least 2 hours just to get on. For one thing, the traffic to get there can be a nightmare. Even driving around LAX's traffic horseshoe from one end of the airport to the other can take half an hour or longer on a bad day. You have to check bags at least 45 minutes early, get through security, move through a huge terminal (that alone can be 45 minutes of walking for some of the more remote terminals), wait to board a flight, wait behind a lot of people to get off a flight, and then wait at baggage claim. This of course also assumes that you can find a direct flight where you are going, which is rare since few universities with major sports programs are actually located in major cities. For example, the commercial options for a road trip to WSU are not attractive at all, as one must either settle for a direct flight between LA and Spokane, followed by a 1 hr 18 min bus trip to Pullman or instead opt for a layover (most likely in Portland or Seattle) to catch a Horizon shuttle to Pullman-Moscow. Either option adds additional time and stress that more than offsets the slightly longer flight that could be spent catching up on sleep or doing homework. Consider instead that LAX's charter terminal is a tiny little building, FAR away from its traffic bottleneck on the south end of the airport with minimal security, a minute fraction of the people going through, and the planes are right next to it. Bottom line is that when the teams start chartering private planes, the flights will wait for them, not the other way around. My wife was lucky enough to snap photos with several members of the LA Kings on their way out of town as she was taking a charter for work and had exactly 10 minutes at the terminal between the time the shuttle dropped her off and the plane picked her up. The student-athletes will be treated like royalty. And that isn't even accounting for the rumor I've heard floating around that USC (and possibly UCLA jointly) are looking into building a remote campus/dormitory/training facility somewhere in the Midwest so that teams won't have to take long flights home between back-to-back road games. If anything, their travel burden will be significantly reduced. Oh, and if we are learning anything from recent coaching moves, more money will enable USC and UCLA to poach more coaching talent, which means those athletes will be trained by the best.