I was talking to Majerus on Friday night about preparing for the Richmond game and he started talking about travel in the Atlantic 10 and the disadvantage it puts SLU out. As he got into SLU’s status as a “corner” team, one that had to make a long trip for every road game while other teams just had to make a long trip once, to play them, I interrupted him to tell him that I was quite familiar with the travel situation in the A-10 since, well, I make every road trip. (And I’m not taking a charter plane.)

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “When do you get into Richmond?”

Now, travel in the A-10 isn’t that bad. With the exception of St. Bonaventure, you can fly into every place you’re playing (UMass and Rhode Island require not terribly arduous drives), and most of the cities are of a good size. Still, and I think this is Majerus’ point, the travel in the league is easier for everybody else, since the school’s on the East Coast all have much shorter trips, and that puts SLU at a disadvantage. For the Philly schools, a lot of trips just require a bus. SLU doesn’t have any trips like that. (Though they did bus back from Dayton.)

I suggested, and Majerus agreed whole-heartedly, that the best solution to this would be for the league to establish travel partners. The Pacific 10 is the best example of this: you have two Arizona schools, two Southern California schools, two Northern California schools, two Oregon schools and two Washington schools. Everybody plays everybody twice, but rather than making eight separate road trips like SLU does, Pac-10 schools make four (or five) road trips. UCLA goes to Arizona and plays ASU on Thursday, Arizona on Saturday. It goes to Oregon and plays OSU on Thursday, Oregon on Sunday. It’s remarkably civilized.

The A-10 doesn’t match up quite as well, but you can still make it work. (You’d also have to change how the conference schedules games, but that’s another matter.) SLU, for instance, this season made a trip to George Washington and now has made a separate trip to Richmond. The two cities are a two-hour drive apart. A team could come in, play GW on a Thursday, then take a relatively short bus ride to Richmond to play on Saturday. It wipes out one entire plane trip. Another team would be doing the opposite, playing at Richmond on Thursday, GW on Saturday. The same goes for Philadelphia. SLU has already made a trip in to play La Salle, and will make a later trip to play St. Joseph’s. Why not put the two together?

So pair ‘em up: Dayton and Xavier (50 miles apart), La Salle and St. Joe’s (the same city), Fordham and Temple (95 miles), UMass and Rhode Island (116 miles), St. Bonaventure and Duquesne (220 miles, a 31/2 hour drive), and, well, St. Louis and Charlotte. That would be the one tough trip for people, but at least they’re big cities with a good number of flights.

Yes, some things would have to change. The A-10 plays games on Wednesdays and Saturday, and you would have to change it to Thursday-Saturday, for the most part, for this to work. The current scheduling system, which allocates the extra games according to how a team is expected to do in the standings, wouldn’t work. But I think it’s worth a look.