The Vikings Will Stay Close to Home in 2023
Josh Frey
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Usually, fans don’t want their favorite NFL teams ranking near the very bottom of lists and rankings. These sorts of low rankings indicate a problem that could derail a season. However, this time around, we’ve found a list that Vikings fans should be very happy to see the Vikings ranking near the bottom.
That list is the ranking of total miles that each NFL team will travel during the 2023 season. After a season where the Vikings ranked 10th in travel during 2022 (18,570 miles), the Vikings will stay close to home, having the fifth-fewest miles to travel during the 2023 season. This year, they will travel a measly 13,226 miles, and they are only one of 12 teams to change time zones 16 or fewer times.
In fact, the entire NFC North will be staying close to home this season. The Detroit Lions will travel the sixth-fewest miles, going just 13,923 miles and hopping time zones only eight times. Meanwhile, the Chicago Bears are slated to travel just 12,253 miles, and the Green Bay Packers will travel 11,956 miles. The Bears and Packers travel the third and second fewest miles in the league, respectively. The team traveling the least this year is the Cincinnati Bengals, narrowly edging out the Packers at 11,942 miles.
So, what is the cause of this lack of travel for the Vikings and the entire NFC North? Well, for one, none of the teams will take place in any international games this fall, unlike 2022 when both Green Bay and Minnesota traveled to London.
Then, for the Vikings specifically, there was a chance that they could have been forced to travel to the edges of the country (Los Angeles, Tampa Bay, New Orleans), but instead, these teams are all coming to U.S. Bank Stadium. The longest trek the Vikings have to make is to Las Vegas, approximately 1300 miles one-way. They won’t travel 1000 miles for any other game this season.
There’s also the fact that the NFC North teams are beneficiaries of being plopped smack-dab in the middle of the country, so any travel for them will be less than it is for other teams. Traveling to Las Vegas from Minneapolis, while still long, is much shorter than traveling from, say, New York.
As such, the teams that make up the top-five in travel miles this year are the Seattle Seahawks (31,600), San Francisco 49ers (29,958), Miami Dolphins (27,110), Los Angeles Rams (26,332), and Los Angeles Chargers (26,102). All these teams reside on either the east or west coasts.
Josh Frey is a Class of 2020 graduate of The College of Idaho and managing editor of PurplePTSD.com. When he’s not writing about the NFL, Josh enjoys running, gaming, or rooting for the Milwaukee Brewers and Bucks. Check out his Twitter account: @Freyed_Chicken.
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