THE BOWL ELIGIBLE BLOG
The Closest FBS Stadiums to Each Other
Two FBS stadiums sit 2.6 miles apart in the same city. We measured every nearest-neighbor distance in our 136-stadium database, from Atlanta's pair to Hawaii's 2,399-mile isolation.
Our Pin Drop Saturday database holds 366 verified college stadiums, and 136 of them are FBS homes with coordinates attached. So we did the obvious thing with a file like that: measured the straight-line distance from every FBS stadium to its nearest FBS neighbor, all 136 of them, and ranked the pairs. A method note before the list, because the list depends on it. These are stadium-to-stadium distances as the crow flies, computed from the latitude and longitude in the database, not driving miles. Your mileage, literally, will vary.
The top of the list
The closest pair in the country is not a famous rivalry. It is an intracity one. Georgia Tech's Bobby Dodd Stadium and Georgia State's Center Parc Stadium are both in Atlanta, and they sit 2.58 miles apart. They are not conference rivals, they rarely play, and most fans driving between them would spend the trip in traffic on the Downtown Connector. But no two FBS stadiums in America are closer.
Second is Houston, and it is nearly as tight. The University of Houston's stadium and Rice's stadium are 3.62 miles apart, across town in the same city. Third is a pair that surprises people: Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor and Eastern Michigan's Rynearson Stadium in Ypsilanti are 5.24 miles apart. The Big House's nearest neighbor is a MAC stadium you can almost see on the same map tile.
The rest of the top ten:
| Pair | Distance |
|---|---|
| Georgia Tech / Georgia State (both Atlanta, GA) | 2.58 mi |
| Houston / Rice (both Houston, TX) | 3.62 mi |
| Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI) / Eastern Michigan (Ypsilanti, MI) | 5.24 mi |
| Duke (Durham, NC) / North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC) | 8.51 mi |
| Kent State (Kent, OH) / Akron (Akron, OH) | 11.14 mi |
| USC (Los Angeles, CA) / UCLA (Pasadena, CA) | 12.24 mi |
| Miami (Miami Gardens, FL) / FIU (Miami, FL) | 16.62 mi |
| San Jose State (San Jose, CA) / Stanford (Stanford, CA) | 17.92 mi |
| NC State (Raleigh, NC) / Duke (Durham, NC) | 18.31 mi |
| Bowling Green (Bowling Green, OH) / Toledo (Toledo, OH) | 19.28 mi |
Duke and North Carolina at 8.51 miles is the famous one, the core of the Research Triangle, and NC State is close enough to both that the three schools form a triangle where no leg exceeds 19.80 miles. Kent State and Akron play for the Wagon Wheel and their stadiums are 11.14 miles apart. USC and UCLA are 12.24 miles apart, which means the Victory Bell rivalry is contested between a stadium in Los Angeles and one in Pasadena. Bowling Green and Toledo, the Battle of I-75, are 19.28 miles apart, which is close enough that the interstate in the rivalry's name is most of the trip.
The next five pairs stretch the definition of neighborhood a little further. Kennesaw State's stadium is 20.36 miles from Georgia Tech's, which puts two of the top eleven pairs in metro Atlanta's orbit. Navy and Maryland are 23.65 miles apart. Miami (OH) and Cincinnati are 29.22, Texas and Texas State are 29.48, and Florida Atlantic and Miami are 30.11. And a small symmetry worth noting: only eight stadiums in the entire database have a nearest neighbor inside 10 miles, and they form exactly the four pairs at the top of the table. Everyone else's closest neighbor is at least a short highway drive away.
What the whole distribution looks like
Zoom out from the top ten and the map gets roomy fast. The median FBS stadium has its nearest neighbor 60.3 miles away. Twenty-two stadiums have a neighbor within 25 miles, and only eight are within 10 miles of another FBS stadium. College football looks clustered on a map of the Southeast and the Midwest, and it is, but even in the dense regions most programs are an hour from the next one.
Then there is the far end of the table. Hawaii is in a category of one: its nearest FBS neighbor is Stanford, 2,399.4 miles away across the Pacific. Nothing else is close to that number. The next most isolated stadium is Texas Tech's, and its nearest neighbor is TCU, 267.6 miles away in Fort Worth. Boise State and Washington State are each other's nearest neighbors at 221.2 miles. Washington's nearest neighbor, Oregon State, is 218.7 miles away, and North Dakota State's nearest, Minnesota, is 217.4. In the lower 48, isolation is measured in a long drive. For Hawaii it is measured in time zones.
Why we measured it
Proximity is the quiet engine under half the rivalries in the sport, and it is the entire mechanic of Pin Drop Saturday: we show you a stadium photo and you tell us where on the map it lives. The pairs above are the ones the game makes hardest, because 2.58 miles is a rounding error at map scale. Atlanta's two stadiums are one misclick apart. Now you know which misclick it is.