Steelers travel in 2023 ranks them near the middle of the pack

Today, May 11th, the 2023 NFL regular season schedule is slated to be released, and while all NFL teams wait to see what their detailed schedule looks like there are some things which are already known.

One of the aspects of the schedule have been known for months would be the vast majority of opponents and locations. Once the final opponents are known, based on where they finish the previous season in their divisional rankings, the process of looking at specific aspects of the upcoming season can commence.

An area of concern for many teams are how many miles they’ll be traveling. While commercial flights are the norm these days, for football teams who have to travel a lot can become an issue in the long term.

Thanks to Bill Speros, he tracked just how many miles each team will travel this season, and fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers will be happy to know they are near the middle of the pack.

Here are some numbers, courtesy of Adam Schefter of ESPN:

For the Steelers, they travel a whopping 16,525 miles, crossing 20 time zones. The west coach trips to play the Los Angeles Rams and Seattle Seahawks certainly add a significant number to these air miles. Compare this number to last season, when the Steelers had one of the least amount of air miles traveled, and it is still a reasonable number.

As for the rest of the league, the teams who call the west coast home are near the top of the league in these categories.

Here are the Top 5 teams, and how many miles they travel:

Seattle Seahawks — 31,600 miles
San Francisco 49ers — 29,958
Miami Dolphins — 27,110
Los Angeles Rams — 26,332
Los Angeles Chargers — 26,102

For those wondering why the Dolphins are in the Top 5 it would be because the team is traveling overseas in the NFL’s international series to play the Kansas City Chiefs in Frankfurt Stadium.

Does the extensive travel equate to the success/failure of a specific team? It can play a factor, but is hardly as significant as a statistic like man-games lost due to injury. Nonetheless, be on the lookout Thursday night at 8pm ET for the official 2023 NFL regular season schedule release. We’ll have all that for you, and more, right here at BTSC.