WVSports – West Virginia travel more manageable in 2024

West Virginia will have a manageable travel schedule when it comes to the 2024 slate.

Unlike last season the Mountaineers won’t be going over the 10,000 mile mark this coming year, but there are still going to be some long road trips as members of the Big 12 Conference.

The Mountaineers are aided by the fact that they will have seven home games with Penn State, Albany Baylor, Kansas State, Kansas, Iowa State and Central Florida all coming to Morgantown.

It also doesn’t hurt that one of the road trips will be to Pittsburgh which is a mere 74 miles up I-79 for the 107th edition of the historic rivalry between West Virginia and the Panthers.

West Virginia also gets the closest conference road game available in a trip to Cincinnati at just 307 miles. It will be the first trip for the Mountaineers to take on the Bearcats since 2011 but West Virginia holds an 8-1 record on the road in this series.

However, the other road trips are going to be rather lengthy.

The longest being the trip to Arizona, which will be the first meeting between the two programs. The Wildcats joined the Big 12 this past August and is the only one of the new Pac-12 additions that West Virginia will play this coming season. That will be a 2,070-mile trip for a conference matchup.

The previous longest trip in the Big 12 Conference before the additions also is on the slate for the program with the Mountaineers set to travel to Lubbock to take on Texas Tech. That will be a 1,465-mile trip for West Virginia to take on the Red Raiders. Overall, the program is 3-3 in Lubbock.

The last road trip will be to Oklahoma State where West Virginia is 3-4 overall. However, it has been a series largely dominated by the Cowboys of late winning eight of the last ten. But one of those wins did come in Stillwater to close out the 2022 campaign.

That will be a trip of 1,083 miles for West Virginia.

In the end that means that the 2024 edition of the Mountaineers will travel a total of 5,000 miles in their five road games or fewer than half of the 10,416 that the 2023 team did. And in the world of conferences spread out across the country, that isn’t too bad.