NC Central’s long trip to UCLA is a novelty. For ACC, it’s a glimpse of what’s to come

Andrea Perry, essentially a one-woman show as the director of football operations at N.C. Central, was finalizing all the small stuff earlier this week, all the details before NCCU’s cross-country trip for its football game on Saturday at UCLA and the Rose Bowl.

She had a diagram of the plane up on one of the monitors in her office to help her plan the seating chart for the flight to Los Angeles. She had a graduate assistant packing snacks into large plastic bags, 310 of them, filled with chips and candy and even the occasional healthier item or two.

“We try to do a nice balance of both,” she said, with a laugh, of the range of snacks. “And of course, the guys will get on there and start trading ... ‘Hey, I have this — I don’t like Doritos, (you’ve got) Cheetos, OK, cool.’”

NCCU announced this trip about two and a half years ago and Perry began working on it not long after. Playing at UCLA has required more than a year of planning, from charter-flight booking to reserving the hotel to planning a couple of side visits — including a tour of SoFi Stadium — to the deliberations over the age-old question with these sort of marathon college football endeavors: Do you drive all your equipment out there, or fly it?

The Eagles decided to load it all onto the plane, and have a 26-foot Penske truck rental waiting at the airport. Scheduling that and everything else — literally, everything — was all part of Perry’s to-do list, which is why it has been a stressful time. She can’t help but stay up thinking about all that could go wrong, from the sometimes inevitable travel delays to the specter of more serious snafus.

Given the distance and time involved, the logistical stakes are higher, the challenges of such a trip more magnified. For NCCU it was an easy decision to say yes to a game at UCLA, and to all the benefits — playing in the Rose Bowl, among them — that come with it. East coast FCS teams, and HBCUs, especially, rarely receive the sort of opportunity the Eagles have on Saturday.

That was the word, “opportunity,” that Trei Oliver, the NCCU head coach, kept coming back to earlier this week. He called it a “business trip” and spoke of a genuine goal of winning, regardless of the long odds. He acknowledged the opportunities beyond the game, too, including the chance to compete in what’s arguably the most historic stadium in the sport.

“I can’t wait to see it,” Oliver said of the Rose Bowl.

For ACC and Big Ten, common cross-country trips

For the Eagles, the trip west is a highly-anticipated one-off, a long journey that represents “the experience of a lifetime,” as Oliver described it when NCCU announced the game in February 2021. In another way, NCCU’s cross-country expedition is a microcosm of what’s soon to become the norm, as major conferences grow larger and more unconstrained by geography.

Amid all the anticipation among his players and staff, Oliver earlier this week attempted to put himself in the future shoes of head coaches who will soon enough be making these kinds of cross-country road trips on the regular. The Big Ten next season is welcoming UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington. The ACC is adding Cal, Stanford and SMU.

Flying across the country to play a college football game is still somewhat of a rare event. That all changes next season, with the dissolution of the Pac-12 and the eagerness of the ACC and Big Ten to absorb some of that conference’s schools, and claim the television revenue (a modest amount, in the case of the ACC) that comes with them.

The logistical toll will be but one challenge of the coast-to-coast conferences of the near future. Then there’s the more important cost — that of the athletes, themselves, who will have to balance the increased travel with all of the other relentless demands on their schedule. This sort of thing is difficult enough to do once, as Oliver is finding out. But doing it often, as will soon be the reality in the ACC and Big Ten?

“I think it’s really going to take a toll on the student-athletes,” said Oliver, who added that he couldn’t fathom doing several times per season what his team is about to do just once. “You know, when you’re getting back in Sunday morning, at 6 a.m., like, when are they really studying? When are they going to get their homework done?

“Because you’re going to have class on Monday. ... Realistically, how much work are they going to be getting done over the weekend? And I think a lot of stuff like that, a lot of folks who are making these changes don’t even consider that. You know, it’s all about the mighty dollar.”

Money, experiences big for NCCU

UCLA is paying NCCU $700,000 for its time and trouble this weekend, and as part of the guarantee NCCU is bringing its renowned Sound Machine Marching Band. That’s part of the experience, too — not only for NCCU but for UCLA, whose athletics director, Martin Jarmond, grew up in Fayetteville, the son of a pair of HBCU alums (his mother graduated from NCCU, his dad from North Carolina A&T).

At the FCS level, these kinds of guarantee games help fund smaller-budget athletics departments. The payday NCCUreceives Saturday, for instance, represents more than 5 percent of its $11.4 million budget of last year, according to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database. The $700,000 for one game is more than NCCU generated in ticket sales all of last year.

The financial reasoning behind regular coast-to-coast travel is less clear for schools in conferences that already reside on the more luxurious side of college athletics’ haves-and-have-nots dividing line. The ACC’s incoming additions of Cal, Stanford and SMU will result in member schools earning a few million dollars more in television revenue, and in an untold, difficult-to-quantify burden on athletes who’ll now be required to make regular cross-country trips.

While NCCU earlier this week was finalizing all the logistics related to its trip to California, administrators at the University of North Carolina — and their counterparts throughout the ACC — were just beginning to calculate the toll of all the future travel that’s to come. UNC on Monday held its first faculty athletics committee meeting of the academic year, where several faculty members bemoaned the league’s decision to expand, a decision UNC adamantly opposed.

Kevin Guskiewicz, the university chancellor, told the committee that UNC anticipated ACC expansion would require at least an additional seven to eight trips per year to the West Coast. He acknowledged the numerous concerns he received from faculty, and coaches, “that informed the decision to vote against expansion.”

With schools ranging from Boston to Miami, and as far west as Indiana, travel in the ACC is already burdensome enough as it is. Elijah Green, a member of the Tar Heels football team, attended the meeting and recounted the reaction among his teammates at the news that their Sept. 23 football game at Pittsburgh wouldn’t begin until 8 p.m.

“The first thing that the players in our group chat said (was), ‘Oh, we’re not getting back until 5 a.m. the next day,” Green said. “And that’s tough, because we get back at 5 a.m., and then we have to meet later that Sunday, probably around 12 o’clock. And that turnaround is really tough for a lot of the student-athletes, and causes a lot of burnout, I feel like in a lot of cases.”

Kiersten Thomassey, a senior on the UNC field hockey team, detailed the misadventures of her team’s trip west last season. The return flight didn’t land until the wee hours of the morning, and the players’ gear and luggage was delayed on top of that. Thomassey and her teammates didn’t get home until past 2 a.m., and some of them had 8 a.m. classes to look forward to.

“For the sports that have the luxury of having a charter it’s so much easier,” she said, though even the ease of charter flights will be tested when they’re five hours long.

UNC’s opposition to expansion

As is the case in these decisions, athletes were not consulted — not in any kind of meaningful way — throughout the ACC’s expansion process. The conference’s chancellors and presidents made the decision, along with Jim Phillips, the commissioner, and the ACC’s television partners. The league hadn’t begun to figure out how scheduling would work, said Bubba Cunningham, the UNC athletic director, and Guskiewicz was pushing for neutral site competition in Dallas — soon to be part of the ACC’s coast-to-coast footprint.

At NCCU this week, meanwhile, a significant part of the anticipation had roots in the novelty of it all, the fact that the Eagles had never had this kind of chance before, and might never again. The excitement came with a steep cost, from the logistics that Perry carefully planned out to the individual challenges of players trying to get ahead on their academic work before departing.

“School comes first, before athletics,” said Adrian Olivo, the Eagles’ senior kicker, and so he’d spent part of the week asking his professors “for the work to come early, to be able to finish it all” before NCCU returns early Sunday morning. By then, the Eagles will undoubtedly be nursing some aches and pains from the field of competition the day before. The long flight could take its toll, too.

For NCCU, it’s all more than worth it. They’ll pack in the trip to SoFi Stadium, where one of the highlights will be touring an exhibit of paintings by Ernie Barnes, an NCCU alum who played football at the school from 1956 through ‘60. There’s a walkthrough at the Rose Bowl, and then the game inside of one of college football’s most venerated cathedrals.

Yet Oliver expressed some relief that this was a special occasion and not a regular occurrence. Could he imagine traveling cross-country like this every year, or even several times per season, as will soon be the case in the ACC?

“Not at all,” he said, and he was learning that making this trip even once was challenging enough.