Continuous miles traveled do not improve on the standard home-field treatment already in the OV Line.
The Ledger · Travel and venue
Travel Distance
Does continuous travel distance explain additional OV-to-market or final-margin differences after standard home-field advantage?
No separate adjustmentNo reliable incremental effect beyond standard home-field treatment.Updated August 30, 2026
Decision
Do not apply a generic travel-distance correction. Continue testing travel only through specific mechanisms such as body-clock timing, unusual multi-game road sequences, or extreme trips.
- Historical seasons
- 2022–25
- Primary sample
- 1,685 non-neutral FBS–FBS games
Start here
What the evidence says
The market does not show a stable extra response to generic travel distance after the opener.
Small result-side changes were inconsistent and not useful directionally.
Show an unusual trip when it helps the user think about the game, while being clear that generic distance did not earn an adjustment.
2026 prospective implementation
Travel distance and time-zone context can be calculated for 2026 games from the cached schedule, venues, and team locations; a matchup disclosure rule is not yet connected.
Current inputs
- Team and venue coordinates
- Kickoff time
- Time zones
- Neutral-site flag
- Additional source need
- No new source or API call is required for the current schedule.
- Refresh cadence
- Recompute after a venue or kickoff change.
- Coverage and limitations
- The study found no reliable additional effect beyond standard HFA, so any disclosure must remain neutral and zero-point.
Study results
| Test | Games | Result | Validation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full context bundle | 1,685 | 1.1% market-gap RMSE improvement | No final-margin improvement |
| Distance · opening market | 1,682 | Worsened RMSE by 0.004 | No opening-market explanation |
| Distance · final recorded | 1,685 | Worsened RMSE by 0.009 | No final-market explanation |
| Distance · market movement | 1,682 | Worsened RMSE by 0.006 | No paired-provider movement signal |
| Split extra rest | 1,685 | 1.7% market-gap RMSE improvement | Advanced separately as Rest Differential |
What we tested
Continuous distance did not improve opening-market, final-recorded-market, or opening-to-final movement accuracy. Small result-side changes were inconsistent and not useful as a directional adjustment.
- Great-circle distance from the away team’s home venue to the game venue
- Signed time-zone travel and away-team body-clock kickoff
- Pregame rest, road streak, kickoff context, and standard HFA controls
Leakage and validation safeguards
- Focal-game-excluded OnVarsity Lines
- Leave-one-season-out validation
- Zero-centered context models that cannot silently replace global HFA
- Held-team and held-venue stress tests
What we learned
- General distance did not add a useful correction beyond existing home-field treatment.
- The only stable market signal in the broader context bundle was unequal rest.
- Team- and venue-specific random effects did not improve season-held-out performance.
What this does not prove
- Extreme travel situations may be too rare to estimate precisely in this sample.
- A null generic-distance result does not rule out specific body-clock or scheduling interactions.
How uses this finding
Travel distance receives no point estimate. It may appear under Other conditions we evaluated when a trip is unusually salient, with language that no reliable additional effect was detected.
Historical data record
Revalidated August 30 under market-line contract 2026-08-30.1. The common audit contains 1,685 final-recorded cases and 1,682 provider-paired opener cases with complete venue, kickoff, distance, time-zone, and rest information.
Public game-level table: in preparation