We revisit Pac-12 Friday here to examine an interesting shit show that will get discussed a lot in the next few years for college basketball, college football, and other sports (most of which do not generate a lot of revenue): travel costs for all the teams that left the Pacific-12 Conference. For the public universities now subjected to ridiculous financial commitments in this area, it could get ugly pretty fucking quickly. Fact.

Let’s start with the first offenders: UCLA and USC. The two Los Angeles universities joined the B1G and have a lot of traveling to do for all sports, to far off places like Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania at times. That’s not going to be cheap, even for sports with smaller rosters like volleyball. While the Trojans are a private college and should probably buy a fleet of private jets for sports travel, the Bruins can’t do that.

[We might as well acknowledge here the Oregon Ducks and the Washington Huskies are the same as UCLA.]

Colorado chose to go back to the Big XII, but that conference isn’t what it used to be, the remnants of the ol’ Big Eight and the Southwest Conference from the 1970s and 1980s, etc. The Big XII now includes the universities of Central Florida, Cincinnati, and West Virginia. Those long flights from Denver to Orlando are going to take their toll on the Buffaloes athletic teams, from football to basketball to baseball. Ouch.

[The Utah Utes will have the same challenges as the Colorado teams, for sure. Count on it.]

We can toss Arizona and Arizona State into that travel group, too: flying from Phoenix and Tucson to Cincinnati and Morgantown is going to be a grind—specifically when the Wildcats and Mountaineers face off in any sport. Those are not going to be direct flights, and the more stops, the worst it gets, especially with all the gear traveling along, too, on those multiple legs of air travel. Baggage workers’ strike, anyone?

Finally, the California Golden Bears and the Stanford Cardinal now face a travel slate that includes all the schools along the Atlantic coast—as they play in the Atlantic Coast Conference, despite literally being located on the Pacific coast. Stanford can go the USC route and buy a fleet of planes for all we care, but the Cal sports teams are going to be struggling to afford travel, especially for baseball and Olympic sports.

Forget the pretense of “student athlete” as well: the kids in the smaller sports with no professional future can’t afford to skip their studies, so there will be a lot of dudes sleeping on these flights, because they know they’re going pro—and a lot of guys studying on these flights, because they know they need to make grades. That kind of division on a sports-team roster breeds a lot of resentment: trust us, we’ve seen it up close.

How long does anyone expect this to last? Remember what we said about the implosion of college sports?!