Tennessee is a long state. A Memphis team playing in the Tri-Cities is a six-hour drive from home, farther than Memphis to St. Louis. Coaches talk about it constantly: the legs, the bus, the tournament two time zones from the pillow. Now that every school on this site is geocoded, we can finally ask whether all that road actually shows up in the results. The answer is a clean, slightly deflating no.
For every away game since 2008, the rating engine already knows how good both teams were, so it can state what the visitor was expected to earn before kickoff. Compare that to what they actually earned and you get a residual: positive means the road team beat expectations, negative means it fell short. Stack up 73,000 road games and sort them by how far the visitor actually drove, and a real effect appears immediately.
Being the away team costs you. Across the whole database, visitors take about four and a half points of win share less than a neutral field would give them, which works out to roughly 30 ELO of home advantage. That number matches, almost exactly, the home edge measured a completely different way in The Validation Report. So far, so expected. The twist is the second number.
Break the away penalty out by distance and it barely moves. A team playing six miles across town underperforms by about the same margin as a team that drove two and a half hours:
The correlation between miles driven and the size of the shortfall is 0.01, which is statistically a flat line. The 25-to-50-mile district trip and the 100-to-200-mile cross-state haul cost a team the same. If anything, the very longest trips (200+ miles) show the smallest penalty, and that is almost certainly selection: the programs willing to bus five hours to a showcase are the strong ones who chose to, not average teams dragged there.
If road-weariness were real, it would show up in the programs that live on the bus. It doesn't. Here are the teams with the longest average road trips and how they actually fared against expectation on those trips:
The list is a mix of pluses and minuses clustered around zero. The programs that travel most are not systematically ground down by it. A team's rating already accounts for the quality of the opponents it drove to face; the drive itself adds nothing on top.
Home field is real; distance is not. Playing away costs about 30 ELO, a fixed toll for sleeping in your own bed the night before. But that toll is the same whether the visitor came from across the county or across the state.
The intuition that a long road trip is extra hard turns out to be a story we tell about the bus, not something the scoreboard confirms. The cost of a road game is paid at the door, not by the mile. The one honest takeaway for a coach: a close underdog is a little live at home and a little dead on the road, no matter how short the trip.