Somewhere over the Rockies, life in the new Big Ten must have hit home for Miller Moss.

Moss, now at Louisville, was USC’s starting quarterback in its inaugural season in a new league. The Trojans played conference games at Michigan, Minnesota and Maryland and lost all three, despite being favored in each game. Moss and his teammates made three long flights back to L.A., their knees folded behind tray tables and their legs stuffed into compression boots designed to improve circulation and reduce soreness.

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“Just being completely candid, if you fly back that long and you lose the game, you’re sitting on that flight for five hours coming back,” Moss said. “For lack of a better word, that sucks.”

The Trojans were part of a statistic that was broadcast widely during the Big Ten’s first season as a bicoastal conference following the additions of USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington from the Pac-12. Big Ten teams traveling across two or more time zones were 8-18 in league play and 8-20 overall, with road teams underperforming the point spread by about 2.2 points in those games.

Those statistics need some context. Big Ten teams were 47-34 at home last season in conference games, so it’s no surprise that teams crossing multiple time zones had a losing record. Ohio State, Penn State and Indiana, three of the Big Ten’s four CFP participants, crossed multiple time zones only once; UCLA, Washington and USC, teams that finished a combined 11-16 in the Big Ten, did it three times each. (Oregon, the Big Ten champion, also crossed multiple time zones three times and produced three of the eight wins.)

Was the 8-18 record a product of more road games involving mediocre teams, or did those teams have mediocre records in part because they had to travel more? It’s difficult to separate the two factors, but coaches and players generally downplay the impact of long trips.

“I wouldn’t put any of that on the travel or changing time zones, whatever that may be,” USC lineman Elijah Paige said. “In the NFL, you’ve got to travel all across the country. All of us want to play in the NFL, so we’re doing that right now.”

*Round-trip miles traveled for Big Ten conference games only

While it’s intuitive to see a connection between jet lag and diminished athletic performance, studies designed to test that question haven’t produced uniform results, said Vishesh Kapur, founder of the UW Sleep Medicine Center at the University of Washington. That doesn’t mean the effect isn’t there, only that it’s difficult to isolate and measure.

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“There’s some inconsistency on the exact impact,” Kapur said. “I think there’s more consistency on what folks like me think about what the impact should be.”

Anyone who’s flown from Los Angeles to New York knows the feeling of waking up in a new city, feeling foggy, fatigued, disoriented or out of sync. This is because travel across time zones disrupts the body’s circadian rhythms, those natural patterns that regulate sleep, energy, digestion and other processes.

Garrett Augsburger, a sports science researcher and adjunct professor at TCU, founded a company called Flatline Fitness that helps travelers deal with jet lag. He’s also published research on the link between travel and athletic performance and works with elite athletes to help them perform better after long trips.

Augsburger said it’s “100 percent plausible” that the cross-country travel contributed to Big Ten teams performing worse than expected when crossing multiple time zones.

“Anecdotally, you can feel that when you wake up after travel and you’re like, ‘This doesn’t feel right,’” Augsburger said. “Our internal clock is affected by that jump in time zones. It’s going to negatively affect reaction times, sleep architecture, cognitive processing and, in athletes, injury risk.”

Circadian rhythms are controlled by a region of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. When light hits the retina, Kapur said, it triggers a response in the brain that keeps the body’s natural processes operating on the same internal clock.

This internal clock regulates body temperature and hormone production, factors that influence athletic performance. Body temperature rises throughout the day, Augsburger said, which allows muscles to fire more quickly, increasing reaction time and reducing injury risk.

“Particularly when you go three time zones or more, you’re acutely causing a dyssynchrony between your activities and your body clock, which is still set to your old time zone,” Kapur said. “That leaves you feeling not well.”

Not everyone responds to cross-country travel in the same way. The body’s response is influenced by a person’s diurnal chronotype — or, in layman’s terms, whether you’re a morning person or an afternoon person.

Peak athletic performance happens in the late afternoon or early evening for most people, Augsburger said, though a few people peak earlier in the day. If a competition is scheduled outside of a person’s peak window — say, early in the morning for a team traveling west to east or late at night for a team traveling east to west — it’s important to acclimate in advance.

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Acclimation is especially important for West Coast teams playing early games in the Eastern Time Zone. That’s partly due to a quirk of the body’s internal clock, which prefers a day slightly longer than 24 hours. A person living in a cave with no natural light would gravitate toward a day that lasts between 24 1/2 and 25 hours, Kapur said. Traveling east to west works in harmony with the natural preference for a longer day, while traveling west to east works against it.

For players at Oregon, preparing for a game in the Eastern Time Zone is a weeklong process. Players adjust their meal times and sleep schedules, and the team does a workout called a “primer” the morning of the game to synchronize players’ internal clocks.

“You can’t try to feel OK the night before,” tight end Kenyon Sadiq said. “It starts a week in advance.”

The need for extra recovery after a long trip often exceeds in importance the preparation time for travel, according to several Big Ten players and coaches who endured a football season of extended flights and triple-time-zone jumps.

“The worst part of the game was when we got back so late,” Penn State offensive lineman Nick Dawkins said of an October 2024 trip to USC.

The Nittany Lions traveled west a day early — Thursday instead of Friday — and won 33-30 in overtime at the Coliseum. The experience prepared Penn State players for a December trip to Arizona for a College Football Playoff quarterfinal game that it won against Boise State.

“Everyone’s doing the same thing,” Penn State safety Zakee Wheatley said. “There’s no excuses to be made. Travel and play football.”

Still, many Big Ten programs employ experts in sports science tasked in part to minimize the disadvantages inherent in playing on the road.

“The No. 1 thing is education,” said Mitch Cholewinski, Nebraska’s coordinator of sports science. “If the players don’t know, they can’t be an active participant in their own recovery.”

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To assist their recoveries, Cholewinski said he encourages Nebraska players to take measures that begin days before a trip: Sleep an extra 35 to 40 minutes per night, and if they can’t get the rest at home, sensory deprivation tanks are available at the Huskers’ football complex for use after practice or between classes.

In devising a recovery plan, he considers total travel time over travel distance. Not all trips are created equal. A visit to UCLA or Maryland, both on the Nebraska schedule in 2025, might include a substantial bus ride after the flight. Cholewinski coordinates with the nutrition staff to inform players on every detail of a trip and advises them on hydration efforts and strategies with food.

“Don’t eat (Raising) Cane’s before dinner,” he said. “I try to nudge them as much as I can, because they have enough stuff going on.”

Whether you’re a star quarterback or a business traveler, the advice for combating jet lag is largely the same. Make sure you’re well rested before you go and squeeze in a few strategic naps leading up to the trip. Drink lots of water. Avoid alcohol and unhealthy airport food. And try to get a good dose of sunlight in the morning to jump start the body’s daily cycle.

This isn’t revolutionary stuff for programs that spend millions to maximize the performance of their athletes. If you ask most coaches, they’ll say the impact of long-distance travel is overblown, given all the time and energy they spend addressing it. But in a hyper-competitive sport, coaches are looking for even the slightest advantage. That’s why USC decided to tweak its travel routine after the Trojans finished 7-6 overall in their first season in the Big Ten.

“I can’t sit here and say (the travel) was some massive factor on the season,” coach Lincoln Riley said. “I don’t believe that. Now, are there things that both on our weekly schedule and then when we travel that we’re going to adjust and do differently? Yes. They’re not earth-shattering. But there are some things we feel like are going to give our team a better chance to play better, recover better and be ready to go on the road.”

All of the sophisticated recovery in the world can’t make a five-hour flight more enjoyable, especially after a loss. That’s one thing Moss won’t miss after transferring from the Big Ten to the ACC, where he’ll avoid a trip to face one of the conference’s own California schools.

“Every hour you’re on that plane is an hour you’re not walking through, you’re not watching film, you’re not meeting with your guys,” Moss said, adding that the travel “wears on a team.”

“Luckily for us, I think the farthest we go west is Dallas for SMU.”

— The Athletic’s Matt Baker contributed reporting.

(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; photos: Diamond Images / Getty, Icon Sportswire / Getty, Tom Hauck / Getty)