Players are dealing with far-flung travel, jet lag and the pressures of trying to balance the roles of student, athlete and entrepreneur more than ever before.
Playing football this season for the U.C.L.A. Bruins means being a frequent (and distant) flier. The team began the campaign in August with a win at the University of Hawaii. Their next road games sent the Bruins to Louisiana State, then Penn State, and back across the country to Rutgers. Then, a trip to Nebraska on Saturday and a jaunt up to Washington.
Such is the life of the modern-day college athlete, with U.C.L.A. moving into the Big Ten Conference, the erstwhile standard-bearer for Midwest football that now stretches from Piscataway to Puget Sound.
In all, the Bruins will travel 22,226 miles this season — nearly enough to circumnavigate the globe. It is the equivalent of 33 round trips to the Bay Area to play Stanford or U.C. Berkeley, U.C.L.A.’s former rivals that have moved to a newly bicoastal league of their own.
“The long flights are definitely a new thing,” said Carson Schwesinger, a junior linebacker at U.C.L.A. who is studying bioengineering. “But that’s the age of college football.”
In the ever bigger business of college athletics, conference consolidation has been an ongoing disruptive force. Brand-name programs have leaped at money from television networks, which have created their own football super leagues.
The end result may be more compelling programming, great for some athletic programs and fans, but it comes at a cost to the athletes in many sports who have been thrust into far-flung leagues that exist only to draw television revenue from football. Longer trips for games, extra missed classes and the effects of jet lag are heaping additional pressure on young adults trying to balance the roles of student, athlete and — in an age when they can cash in on their fame — entrepreneur.
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