For a Florida Gator fan, a 60,000-mile road trip leads to 77 games — and a Georgia title

On the day the college football season began, Ben Chase — a 33-year-old lawyer from Florida who was living in Arizona and had recently lost his job — posted a video on social media.

“I’m going on a little bit of a road trip,” he said.

This was an understatement, kind of like saying Bear Bryant had a little bit of a following in Alabama, or the Stanford band had a little bit of a role in a memorable play, or — since Chase is a Florida Gators fan — Tim Tebow created a little bit of a stir while in Gainesville.

That day Chase hopped in “Betty White” — what he calls his white 2017 Dodge Caravan — and drove about four hours from Tucson to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he watched New Mexico State lose 23-12 to Nevada.

On Monday, Chase and Betty White were in Los Angeles for the final game of the college football season, Texas Christian against Georgia.

In between, he went to 75 other games, from coast to coast, from games like Auburn vs. Alabama in Tuscaloosa to ones like Stonehill vs. St. Francis in Loretto, Pennsylvania.

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There were times when Chase managed to make it to six games in a week. Seven times he went to two games in one day, always making it to the second game in time for kickoff and never leaving any game before the final whistle.

Along the way, he and Betty White blew past what had been touted as the record for most epic college football road trip ever — two brothers driving 25,000 miles to attend 50 games in 2016.

He drove more than 60,000 miles — including 6,000 on a rental car after Betty blew her transmission in Georgia, on the way to a game in Ohio — and was in the stands for 77 games in 75 different stadiums, involving 115 teams.

“That’s like 115 religions — 115 sects of our culture, our country,” he said.

Started with bus rides to UCF games

To understand his love of college football, maybe it makes sense to start with his childhood in Orlando.

His parents divorced when he was about 2. His mother worked multiple jobs to make ends meet. In elementary school, he went to an afterschool program that on weekends took kids to UCF football games. This was before UCF built a stadium, back when it played football games off campus at the Citrus Bowl.

“They never could fill the stadium,” Chase said. “So if we wanted to go, all we had to do was show up at the local community center. We’d hop on a bus. They’d give us food before the game. We got shirts and would sit behind the goalposts.”

He was hooked — and maybe not just on college football, but on the adventure of getting to a game.

In middle school, one of the teachers at his school became sort a father figure. He was a UCF grad. So he’d have Chase tag along for games and help with the setting up of another key piece of the college football experience – pregame tailgating.

After high school, Chase worked at Disney before heading to Valencia College in Orlando and then UF. While in Gainesville, he not only went to home sporting events, he and his friends often piled in a car and made long road trips. He enjoyed that part of it. The long drive, even if it didn’t lead to the outcome he’d hoped for.

“The year I graduated, we went 4-8 and Florida State won the national championship,” he said, adding with a little bit of sarcasm: “So it was a great year.”

When he ended up at George Washington for law school, he’d hop in his car and drive the nearly 800 miles back to Gainesville for a game. When he started tweeting about his trips, people followed along. In 2020, when the Gators played at College Station, Texas and he drove from Orlando overnight, through parts of a hurricane, some Florida State fans sent him money via Venmo “because they thought it was the stupidest thing ever.”

People also kept sending him Reddit posts of a map of the “ultimate college football road trip.”

But who has the time and money to do something like that?

In August, he got the time. He had been working for a company creating programs related to the NCAA’s relatively new Name, Image, Likness (NIL) policy. When he was let go, he applied to a few other jobs – but he also looked at the “ultimate college football road trip” map and read about the two brothers who had been to 50 games in a season.

He decided he wanted to go to 60 games. And he wasn’t going to simply do the most efficient itinerary. He was going to make a plan — but, to a degree, he also was going to wing it.

“Can I afford this?” he said in the video he posted on Aug. 27. “Absolutely not.”

In the end, a Georgia game

I tried to meet up with Chase when I went to the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia in early December. He, of course, was there. It just didn’t work out. But we caught up by phone a few days before the national title game.

He was in Frisco, Texas, crashing at a friend’s place before finishing off the road trip.

When he started, Betty White had 74,000-some miles on her odometer. Now that’s over 127,000. There have been a few times, he says, “when Betty has not been in the best of moods.”

Still, she made it this far. And in the last five months, he also successfully fit in three weddings (he says he’s grateful to the brides for scheduling Sunday weddings) and, just for fun, a couple of basketball games. He made it to several states he hadn’t seen before – adding the ones needed to be able to say he’d set foot in all of the Lower 48 — and touched the water in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

He bought gas for everywhere from $2.30 a gallon to $7.50 a gallon. He does not know how much he has spent total.

“I don’t want to look,” he said. “I’ve maxed out two credit cards. I’ve paid some of it off. But I’ll look at that stuff in February when I have an income.”

He has saved money by spending close to 100 nights sleeping in his minivan in Walmart parking lots and truck stops. And he figures he’s only paid for tickets for 14 of the 77 games.

When he went to that first game, he walked up to a tailgate party and asked if they had any extra tickets. They gave him one. And that has continued, particularly as word of his trip spread. Some schools have given him tickets. When he went to a game at Benedict College, a track coach walked him in through a gate.

When he went to a Central Michigan game, the head coach — former UF coach Jim McElwain — invited him to stay at his home.

He, of course, included a Florida game (the Gators’ opener, a 29-26 victory against Utah) and a UCF game (a 41-19 victory against SMU). But he points to a Florida State game against LSU in New Orleans — a blocked extra point to win the game — as one of the most memorable.

Ask him about the most memorable atmospheres and while he starts with a disclaimer — these were his experiences for these particular games, yours may vary — and he mentions a night game at Auburn, the Penn State White Out, the Michigan Maize Out, and the Army-Navy meeting in Philly.

He says that if there’s one game he could picture trying to get to every year it’s Army-Navy.

But he keeps coming back to his road trip to Texas for a TCU game at Baylor — and not just because it ended in such dramatic fashion, with TCU kicking a walk-off field goal to preserve its then-unbeaten record.

He described the Baylor Line — a tradition where thousands of new students run across the field to create a human tunnel for the team to run through — and said “it’s the only place I’ve been to that the crowd is yelling something on every defensive play.”

Along the way, he’s done quite a few interviews. One time he made the mistake of reading some of the comments. Someone said something along the lines of “imagine this is what you’re known for.”

That inspired him to do what the afterschool program did for him. Get kids to a game. Before a game at the University of South Florida, he posted a video about hoping bring about 70 kids to the game. The USF athletic director contacted him and the school ended up taking care of the tickets.

He’s gotten all kinds of other messages from people who say they’re traveling vicariously, following along all the way to SoFi Stadium.

He did buy a ticket in advance for the championship game. When it turned into the TCU Horned Frogs against the Georgia Bulldogs, the Gator fan knew which team he’d be rooting for.

He arrived in Los Angeles, wearing purple and screaming for “the underfrogs.”

Throughout the season, people kept asking him if he was going to include a Georgia game. He didn’t come to Jacksonville for the Florida-Georgia game. He was out West, wrapping up a three-games-in-three-days trip with a return to Tucson for USC vs. Arizona. He kept saying he’d end up seeing the Bulldogs eventually.

“I knew this was the inevitable outcome,” he said before the title game. “The fairytale ending to this road trip is seeing my archrival lose the national championship. I don’t expect that to happen, but … TCU is 2-0 with me in attendance.”

That ending didn't happen. But as he was watching Georgia roll to 65-7 victory, the biggest blowout of the 77 games he saw this season, he tweeted an update about where he's heading soon: "I'm excited to announce that it's time to go home. I've officially accepted the position of Director of NIL Strategy at my Alma Mater the University of Florida ..."

That, he said, is the dream. And no matter the ending to the road trip, it lived up to his hopes.

One of my questions for him was: Did it ruin his love of college football? Or did it add to it?

That was one of my concerns when I spent a year traveling to national parks. I worried that maybe it would make me less excited about visiting parks. It didn’t. And traveling to 77 games in one season didn’t make Chase want to spend next fall avoiding games.

“It only made me fall in love with the traditions of college sports even more,” he said. “My thesis of this trip was that college football brings people together more than anything in our country. And this trip only strengthened that belief. … I just want more.”

While he’s planning to move back to Florida, he’s hoping that in the long term what he did the last five months can lead to even more adventures. He’d like to pitch a TV show that is sort of Anthony Bourdain meets college sports. But first he plans to take a brief break, maybe with another road trip.

“I’ll probably just go to the Grand Canyon and turn my phone off for a day,” he said.

mwoods@jacksonville.com

(904) 359-4212

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Florida fan's college football road trip ends with 77 games, UGA title