There’s been some hubbub about the total travel distance the Buffalo Bills will rack up this season to get to games outside Orchard Park (notice I didn’t say “away” games, that’s what we call “a hint”). Now most of the articles about Buffalo traveling close to 20,000 miles this season are comparing it to other teams and their travel schedule. I think that’s fun, but I was curious as to how this compared to other Bills seasons and what impact, if any, travel might have.
Ramble on
There were a couple things I
wanted to take a look at when it comes to travel and thank you to pro-football-reference.com my curiosity was sated very quickly. PFR was the only site I found that tracked travel distance by year, but also listed each away game distance. All of that and more on one page per year. Nice! Now here’s a chart.
Yeah, that’s a lot of data isn’t it, so let’s explain a couple things that a nerd like me was interested in. It would have been simple enough to have the miles traveled column and pointed out that the Bills haven’t put this many miles on the team since 2020, and there is good reason to point out this year as an anomaly.
That wasn’t good enough for Rumblings readers though. I know you love your deep dives as much as I do. I added games played. In this case it’s not “away” games exactly, as two years were home games played at different placed. A November 2022 game against the Cleveland Browns was moved to Detroit and added a few hundred miles. In 2023, the Bills “hosted” the Jacksonville Jaguars in a 7,164 mile round trip to London. You might remember that the Jaguars played in London the week before and had adapted already.
Anyway, the games played column served two purposes. It allowed excel to calculate the average distance traveled so we can glance and see how the longest trips compare to the mean. It also stands alone as a stat. Having to pack up nine times instead of eight can be draining.
You’ll notice the last column is the overall record. I wanted to see if more miles correlated with less wins and I can make this a short paragraph I think. I don’t see anything in the data that suggests any correlation. Total miles doesn’t seem to make a significant swing.
That does make some sense as most seasons with high miles tend to have a few games that are outliers driving things up. The London game in 2023 was nearly half the season total. The 2020 season had the Raiders, but also San Francisco and Arizona. Both those games took place at the Cardinals home turf as a result of COVID restrictions impacting the 49ers.
So far this is a bit ho-hum of an article and nowhere near to being accurate to the title. Well there is one thing I found that might be something to watch. In the timeframe reviewed, the Buffalo Bills record was 98 – 50 for a win percentage of 66%. When you look at the record in their longest trip each season, they’re 4 – 5 for a win percentage of 44%. If you remove the two “learning years” for Sean McDermott, the win percent goes up but there’s still a significant drop for games in the “longest trip” column.
Now it’s true that the home team does tend to have an advantage, but this seems like it has some merit. When the Bills travel to take on the Los Angeles Rams, it doesn’t mean they’re doomed, but the data suggests an extra layer of difficulty.
For my final thought, the last time Buffalo had to travel more than 19,000 miles in a year, they went 13 – 3.
