By the 2012 seasons end, the Raiders will certainly be inthe frequent flyers club.The Silver and Black will lead the NFL in total milestraveled for the upcoming season, according to calculations by Grantland.com.The Raiders will travel 28,700 miles as the crow flies toget to and from their eight road games. Five trips to the Eastern Time Zonetack on the miles for Oakland, including lengthytrips to Miami, Pittsburghand Carolina.Those long road trips could make for a rough road record forthe Raiders. Even with private jets and five-star hotels, teams that have totravel long distances have fared poorly in recent NFL history. Over the past15 seasons, teams that have flown 2000 or more miles have won just 39.8 percentof their games.That stat should give plenty of fodder for complaints frommembers of the NFC and AFC West divisions who routinely top the league indistance traveled. The 49ers led the NFL with 29,112 round-trip miles traveledlast season, although they mitigated that high number to some extent by stayingin Ohio between playing the Bengals and theEagles rather than fly back to SanFrancisco just to travel back east a few days later.After taking out those saved miles, the 49ers total traveldistance was second-most to the Seattle Seahawks. San Francisco and Seattlehave held the title for the longest distance traveled in seven of the past 10seasons. The Raiders and the Chargers took the other three.Niners and Raiders fans can aim their gripes at the AFCNorth teams, which have regularly received the most-favorable a.k.a. shortesttravel schedules. The Steelers, for example, flew just 5,682 miles round-tripin 2008 and played 15 of their 16 games in the Eastern Time Zone. Nine of the10 shortest travel schedules from the past decade came from the AFC North.If its any consolation to Raiders fans discouraged by theirchallenging travel schedule, the 49ers had to travel to five games in theEastern Time Zoneincluding a playoff gameand four more in the CentralTime Zone in 1998. They averaged more than 4,000 miles per road trip. San Francisco stillmanaged to go 12-4 that season before falling in a divisional playoff game.
Colin Becht is an intern with CSNBayArea.com and a senior at Northwestern University
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