ATS Record for College Football Teams Crossing Multiple Time Zones

After yet another massive round of college football conference realignment, long trips for massive road games have become far more common.

Historically, this was often the case in September, as teams scheduled exciting nonconference games. But the last round of realignment in the early 2010s created more dramatic conference road games. 

Missouri was in a division with Florida. Nebraska and Rutgers joined the same conference. West Virginia’s entire schedule was 1,000 miles away. That kind of stuff.

It’s gotten way worse in the last few years. Now, three of the four power conferences stretch across at least three time zones. The result is that there’s almost always at least one game per week where a team on the West Coast is traveling to play a team in the Midwest, or vice versa.

I call these scenarios mega road games, where a team must travel through at least two time zones to play a regular-season college football game. And in my head, there just had to be a college football betting angle.

I went game by game to track their ATS performance in 2024. The results shed some light on a pretty clear betting strategy for 2025 and beyond.

ATS Record for College Football Teams Crossing Multiple Time Zones

In 2024, mega road teams (MRTs) were 35-43-2 against the spread when crossing at least two time zones.

Since Hawai’i is definitionally involved with a mega road game every time they play, I stripped their results out for a statistically similar 33-36-1. 

Now, let me tell you where it gets interesting.

How to Bet College Football Mega Road Teams

MRT underdogs had a decent ATS record of 23-17. The idea here seems to be that the market is overestimating how much a long road trip will hurt a team that is already expected to lose.

However, the MRT favorites were an abysmal 10-19-1 ATS – that’s a 34.5% cover rate – with nine outright upsets on their faraway trip.

The message from 2024 is clear: The business-trip mentality works great for teams who already know they have a tough task ahead of them. But for teams who hit the skies with expectations, they rarely come home with a cover.

Two games from the upcoming Week 1 2025 college football schedule fit this paradigm.

The first is Boise State’s trip to South Florida as a 9.5-point underdog. 

The second is Georgia Tech’s trip west to Colorado as a surprising 4.5-point favorite.