SMU Travel Map 2024: Carolina to California

Inspiration

With the recent conference shakeups in college football, some teams will now travel much further this year than ever before. One prominent example of this is SMU, who has recently joined the ACC. While based in the Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas, Texas, SMU will travel coast to coast to play their schedule this year.

While this this is no doubt difficult for die-hard Mustangs fans, it’s great for random fans like me who will get to see a game much closer to home in North Carolina! Especially since I have a personal connection to the team… my cousin!

This project is an extension of a previous post, check that out if you want to see how I set up a web scraper to grab the info I needed. I’m only going to cover the major differences in this post.

Web Scraping

I developed this project in a Python notebook, see the raw code here. I used FBSSchedules as my reference data. The most difficult part was handling bye weeks. Strangely, SMU has 3 bye weeks this year!

Mapping

I was able to draw lines connecting each week of the season to help visualize the travel path from week to week. I also styled the pins differently for home/away/bye/championship games.