There’s one national ranking that USC and UCLA football are almost guaranteed to finish in the top 20 every year now – miles traveled.

That’s the case again in 2026.

USC will rank No. 8 among the 138 Football Bowl Subdivision teams with a whopping 16,290 round-trip miles for its five road games, according to TripBalls. The Trojans will travel to face Rutgers, Penn State, Wisconsin, Indiana and rival UCLA.

Not far behind is UCLA, which ranks No. 12 with 13,636 round-trip miles for its five road games. The Bruins’ road schedule includes games at California, Maryland, Oregon, Minnesota and Michigan.

Thanks a lot, Big Ten schedule makers.

The distances are straight-line miles between stadium coordinates, not driving or flying distances.

The team leading the nation should come as no surprise.

It’s Hawaii, which must travel by air to every game.

The Rainbow Warriors will cover 37,232 round-trip miles for their six away games. That’s 17 times what Auburn must travel as the team that needs to go the smallest distance – 2,188 miles.

All teams will travel 1,093,266 miles over 770 trips.

Predictably, the former Pac-12 teams will log the most frequent-flier miles as part of their new conference alignments.

Stanford, now in the Atlantic Coast Conference, ranks No. 2 with 21,758 miles and Cal – a fellow ACC member – is No. 6 with 18,102 miles.

Oregon checks in at No. 9 with 15,968 miles for its five trips and Washington ranks No. 16 at 12,448 miles for its five trips.

The Big Team traveling the least?

That’s Rutgers, which will travel only 4,084 miles for its five road trips – ranking No. 116 in the nation. That means the Trojans will travel nearly four times the distance of their conference counterparts from the East Coast.

USC and Rutgers will face one another in Piscataway, N.J., on Sept. 19.