Football travel is what is. It’s a net equal. The 25 or so other sports no longer have their 2nd closest Conference game in OH. Those Midwest schools are now the far ones not the close ones.
In truth though, the amount of money we were spending (and thus are now saving) on travel is usually overblown.
We have 22 sports (10 M, 12 W) we sponsor at varsity.
For nine of those sports, (Cross Country M&W, Track and Field M&W, Swimming and Diving M&W, men's golf, Tennis M&W), the only conference competition we have is a once a year conference championship. Most of the competition takes place regionally rather than interconference, and will frequently not even be against one single team but rather in multiteam meets (Cross Country, for example, competed in the Paul Short Run at Lehigh this year, and 45 schools ran in that event).
Women's crew is similar, and didn't go further than Philadelphia for a meet, without even an AAC championship to contend with.
Women's lacrosse played in the American, but only UConn, Cincinnati, Temple and ECU played in that league (alongside otherwise SEC teams Florida and Vanderbilt). In other words, the three closest teams in the American.
Field hockey never left the Big East (and field hockey is another one of those sports where very often, teams would play each other at another team's home venue just because they were already there; the somewhat infamous Kent State fireworks controversy this past season took place at a game between Maine and Temple; UConn itself played a match against Northwestern at Stanford's home field on the same weekend the Huskies played the Cardinal).
Men's and women's hockey ice hockey play in Hockey East, which has most of its teams within a two hour drive.
Baseball and softball were going to play lots of events in Florida, Texas or the rest of the sun belt anyway, regardless of what conference we were in. The only thing that changed with being in the AAC was whether those were conference games, or non-conference games against Northern teams that were played in Florida anyway.
That just leaves six with any kind of relevant travel expenses relating to playing in the American: football, men's and women's basketball, men's and women's soccer, and volleyball.
And of those, men's and women's basketball were likely profitable enough that the travel expenses for an AAC schedule were nullified, and football is football.
So the pain of travel was really down to three sports. Men's and women's soccer, and women's volleyball.
