Even though this Saturday’s big University of Oregon football game against Penn State is more than 2,300 miles away, Eugene-based superfan Chris Smith has long known he would go.
In 2024, his alma mater switched from the West Coast-based Pac-12 conference to the country-stretching Big Ten.
When Oregon made the move, it was clear that travel to away games would be more costly and far more of a logistical headache for fans determined to attend away games. In no case is that more true than for this weekend’s game in State College, Penn.
When simply counting miles traveled, Saturday’s game isn’t the farthest Ducks fans will journey this season. But it is the most complicated, the most time consuming and likely the most expensive.
Out of necessity, Smith and his fiancee, for instance, will rise at 3:30 a.m. Thursday to make it to their 6 a.m. flight from the Eugene Airport.
They will switch planes twice and endure more than 10 hours of flight time and layovers before landing in Harrisburg, Penn., where they will stay 90 minutes away from the football stadium. They made that choice because hotels close to the game exceed $1,000 a night.
And when they finally enter the 106,000-seat Beaver Stadium, they’ll head toward what Smith describes as their $200 apiece “super nosebleed” seats.
And like many of the at least 3,000 others who will fill the Ducks’ visiting team fan section Saturday for what so far is considered the biggest game of the season (both teams are undefeated and Oregon ranks No. 6 while Penn State is No. 3 in the nation), Smith is willing to go to great inconvenience and great expense to support his home team. And soak in the experience.
“Watching it on TV, it’s just not the same. Especially when you have big games like that, the atmosphere, the energy is different,” said Smith, 47 and a 2005 UO grad, who estimates that he and his fiancee will spend close to $3,000 on the trip.
But that devotion has been tested for many fans since Oregon announced in 2023 that it was leaving the Pac-12 conference, which only competed with schools in Oregon, Washington, California, Arizona, Utah and Colorado. Instead, Oregon joined the Big Ten conference, which consists of many schools in the Midwest and on the East Coast, and distances to get to games have more than doubled, from no more than about 1,000 miles before to well over 2,000 miles in some cases now.
That means flight times for the team, even on its chartered jets, also have more than doubled. Instead of a roughly 2.5 hour charter flight that would be the longest typically endured by players in the Pac-12, the 74 traveling players of the Oregon team will be in the air for about five hours before landing in Pennsylvania Friday.
For Duck fans who fly commercial, the predicament is even worse. Instead of flying nonstop, flights to some of the farthest flung Big Ten universities can involve one or two stops before arriving at the nearest major airport.
Because Big Ten schools are more likely to be located in small towns, the next leg of the trip sometimes involves drives that exceed an hour or two.
Another game this season — at Rutgers University in New Jersey on Oct. 18 — is farther from Oregon, but the travel time to Rutgers is often actually shorter given that it’s just a 30-minute drive from one of the nation’s busiest and easiest to get-to airports, Newark Liberty International Airport.
On the contrary, Penn State is a two hour and 40 minute drive from its nearest major airport, Pittsburgh International Airport. (Flying into Baltimore or Philadelphia necessitates a more than three hour drive).
There also are other options for getting to Penn State, but they might be less desirable: The much smaller Harrisburg International Airport will bring Ducks fans closer to Penn State, within a 90-minute drive. The same goes for the tiny airport next to Penn State, State College Regional Airport. But because connections to these airports often take longer, it’s often faster to simply drive from Pittsburgh. It’s cheaper, too.
That’s the case for 29-year-old Christian Medina, a 2018 UO graduate who lives in Los Angeles but makes it a point to travel to three to four away games each football season. He bought his airline ticket for the Penn State game in May for about $300. But it’s a red-eye from Los Angeles to Orlando to Pittsburgh.
He’ll then drive a rental car about two hours to a small town about 45 minutes from Saturday’s game, where he’ll share a hotel room with a childhood friend, who’s also a fellow UO alum. Many of their friends, from Portland and other parts of the country, will meet in Pennsylvania come game day, in what every fall at universities across the country becomes a reunion.
“This is what I consider a no-brainer for us,” said Medina, noting the caliber of Saturday’s game. “It’s like, ‘We’re going, no matter what.’”
Medina figures he’ll spend a total of about $1,500 on the extended weekend trip, which includes about $175 for his share of the rental car, $275 for the hotel and $375 for his game ticket. He said it used to be “dramatically, dramatically less expensive” when the Ducks were part of the Pac-12. Trips back then might involve one short, non-stop flight for as little as $100 out of Los Angeles International Airport and a hotel in a big city that might cost $100 a night.
He’s noticed that many Big Ten universities are in smaller towns with limited accommodations, so prices for hotel rooms on game weekends soar. When The Oregonian/OregonLive checked on Tuesday, the last available hotel room in State College was going for more than $1,300 a night.
Today, Medina said, some fans will go to great discomfort to avoid the exorbitant costs.
“There’s crazy stories of people sleeping in cars,” Medina said, explaining he’s known a few. “It’s just the nature of college football. So many people are just die-hard fans.”
While Smith, the Eugene superfan, has noticed a bigger hit to his pocketbook, he accepts it. It just comes with playing in a more competitive league. He said the one thing that bothers him is that after he and his fiancee booked their trip to Penn State, they learned this month that American Airlines opened a new, direct flight to Harrisburg that would take five hours of travel time, not the more than 10 hours the couple is currently signed up for.
The airline, he said, offered to switch the couple’s flights to the direct ones, but Expedia wouldn’t give them a full refund. So they’re sticking with their current itinerary.
“It’s really frustrating,” Smith said.
Medina, the Los Angeles resident, said when the Ducks were part of the Pac-12, he was able to stay with friends who lived on the West Coast, where many of UO’s alumni live. He said he no longer has that option.
“It was always nice when I’d go up to a Stanford game or a Berkeley game (in the former Pac-12) and I’d know, ‘Oh, I have a fraternity brother that’s from San Jose and I can stay with them,’” Medina said. “Where now, I don’t really know anybody in Pennsylvania and I don’t know anyone who lives in Iowa (locations of two Big Ten universities) or in all these places Oregon is traveling to.”
Like many Ducks fans, Medina says traveling to away games has fundamentally changed. In a nutshell, he said, “it’s a whole different ball game.”