Historic Team Spotlight 2022: Conference Proximity (and also Florida State)

Georgia Tech Tech is Florida State’s closest conference member by distance, so today we ask, how far are all of the conference schools from one another?

To be honest, this idea came about in part as a way to finally write about the new ACC permanent matchups. There have been plenty editorial takes on the matter — why some schools were favored or not, who are the winners and losers, and things like that — so I wanted to make sure any take I had on the matter was new or different. Accordingly, I went on Google Earth, found the latitude and longitudes of all the conference schools, plugged them into the great circle distance formula, and started to crunch some numbers.

Before we get too deep in the numbers, it is worth taking at least a cursory look at the history of the Florida State series. As many know, Tech and Florida State may not be each other’s number one rivals, but they are relatively close to one another and have has a passionate, yet frustratingly inconsistent history of playing each other. Interestingly, Florida State, whose team only existed for three seasons before the Florida legislature turned the school into a women-only institution, actually played Tech twice in the pre-modern era. In those games, Tech posted two shutouts, scoring 17 in 1903 and 35 in 1904.

Once the men returned to the Florida State campus, the football team was reconstituted, as well. Tech and Florida State first played in the modern era in 1952, and given that Tech won a national championship that year, you can probably guess the result. Tech and Florida State would go on to play seven sporadic contests over the next quarter-century, and it took until the third of those games before FSU managed a point, a 17-3 Tech win in 1958. Tech won all seven of those early games, but when the two teams began playing every year following Florida State’s admission to the ACC, the tables certainly were turned. From 1992, the next twelve years represent the only stretch of annual games in the series, and Florida State won every single won, with their 14-13 win in Tallahassee in the twelfth and final game in the stretch being the narrowest margin amongst those games.

Since being split into the Atlantic and Coastal divisions in 2004, all things considered, even though the division setup has typically slotted the two teams into regular season matchups every seven seasons, the two teams have managed to meet relatively consistently. Now that I have typed that sentence, 6 games in a twenty year stretch doesn’t feel particularly frequent, but be it due to the ACC Championship Game (2012, 2014) or the COVID season (2020), they have managed to double what would otherwise be expected. Five of those games took place in the Paul Johnson era, and this tweet from FTRS’ MagnaCarterGT sums up the recent history pretty well:

Should they play more often? Yes. Will they in the new system? Also yes. But are there likely some pairings that would make more sense than Georgia Tech-Wake Forest or Florida State-Syracuse? I would say that is a yes, too.

Before we get into the geography and the maps, here are the usual HTS tables presenting the game-by-game results and the series summary:

Data via Wikipedia, Winsipedia, and the GT Football Media Guide, Compiled by Jake Grant

Alright, on to the maps. In hindsight, it would be interesting to combine this with historic matchup counts for the entire conference, though considering the game this is ostensibly being written for is currently going on, perhaps that is an idea for next week.

First, I went and found the coordinates for all ACC schools and Notre Dame. I included Notre Dame mostly out of general interest, but for the most part, their location being relatively far from the main span of teams along the Eastern Seaboard. From there, I converted the coordinates to radians and plugged them into the great circle distance formula to generate the distances between all the schools. The complete matrix can be found in the table below.

Once all the distances and coordinates were figured out, I plotted all of the distances in Great Circle Mapper by Karl Swartz, which is a phenomenal mapping tool, in a few different configurations. First, I took a look at current divisions and permanent matchups, mostly as a way to illustrate the travel and fan base proximity in a visual way. These can be found in the first gallery presented below. The images all saved as GIFs, but they should be stills. Next, I did the same thing, but with the new permanent matchups, again to illustrate the proximity of the various teams, which can be seen in the second gallery. It might be interesting to plot the other locations just as points, just for comparison.

Grid View

Grid View

I included Notre Dame in the superlative statistics in the rightmost columns, but the most interesting tidbit learned from doing this number crunching was that, other than Notre Dame, Clemson is actually Louisville’s closest conference member by mileage. On the whole, though, a lot of the results were pretty expected. Duke is going an average of 35 miles to their permanent rivals in the new system, while North Carolina and NC State aren’t going too much farther, but are weighted by Virginia and Clemson, respectively.

With the noted Notre Dame exception, Louisville, Florida State, Pittsburgh, and Wake Forest are the schools not locked into permanent matchups with their closest conference-mate (Clemson, Georgia Tech, Virginia, and North Carolina, respectively). Interestingly, from the Louisville perspective, Georgia Tech is a relatively close team, only edged out by Virginia Tech in addition to the teams previously noted. From the Tech angle, only Florida State and somewhat unexpectedly Wake Forest are closer.

It is a travesty to not have our longest continuous series continuing (Duke), a huge miss not to get a feisty an interesting Tech-Florida State series back on the annual schedule, and a whiff to lose the best new rivalry to come out of conference realignment (Virginia Tech). All of these I feel pretty strongly, even if all three could not happen while also preserving the Clemson annual series. However, even though the historic gravitas might not be there with Wake and Louisville for the average Tech fans, Tech does now have locked in annual games with three of the four closest conference teams to campus, which is a plus.

Notably, both the longest possible matchup in the conference, Boston College and Miami (1,259 miles), and the shortest, North Carolina and Duke (9 miles), are annual matchups in the new slate. Unsurprisingly, the Eagles and the Hurricanes are the two schools that are furthest from all other conference members. While Boston College has Syracuse within 300 miles, Miami’s nearest opponent, Florida State, is further than 400 miles from their campus. Wake Forest, the most centrally located of the ACC schools, only has four football-playing members more than 400 miles from Winston-Salem, the previously mentioned pair, along with Florida State and Syracuse.

Other interesting tidbits include Duke’s travel distance sitting at just 35 miles to its permanent rivals, while Miami’s average of 862 miles to its permanent opponents is longer than the distance from Clemson, Duke, North Carolina, NC State, Virginia, Virginia Tech, and Wake Forest to every other ACC school.

All in all, this is more of a curiosity exercise than anything. If you noticed anything jumping out as interesting, odd, or notable, let us know in the comments below!

Given that the game is currently a blowout, I am not sure that the TV information will be as useful as it would ordinarily be in this column, but if you want to turn on the game, it is on ACC Network. As always, though, tune in here at From the Rumble Seat for postgame coverage, along with live updates via @FTRSBlog on Twitter.