Travelling partners in sports

The Game Room
1

I have a question about how US college leagues schedule their competitions. Not football, but basketball and some other sports.

I’m a fan of one school, which happens to be a Pac-12 school. So I follow the league to a certain extent, but don’t pay that much attention to other leagues. Now in the Pac-12, ten of the schools fall into 5 natural pairs and the two newcomers make a not so close 6th pair. When they schedule basketball (also volleyball and no doubt other sports), the teams travel as pairs to play other pairs during each week of league play. For instance, the two Oregon school may travel to Los Angeles to play USC and UCLA. Oregon may play USC on Thursday while Oregon State plays UCLA. On Saturday, the two swap opponents. This arrangement saves money on travel, since for most of the pairs, there’s no need of a plane trip between venues.

It’s not perfect, of course. They need to fly between Salt Lake City and Boulder and it’s a really long bus ride between Seattle and Pullman WA, so I think most teams fly between those two as well.

So my question is: Do other leagues have similar travelling pairs, and if so how conveniently are the pairs located?

2

Major League Baseball used to do something similar. The Cubs and the Cardinals would follow each other around on the road, and visiting opponents would come to Chicago and move on to St. Louis or vice versa. Twice a year, each team in the former NL East would do a 9-game California road trip (3 at San Diego, 3 at L.A., and 3 at San Francisco). Since they started adding all those stupid expansion teams like Arizona, Colorado, and Florida and split the league into three divisions, the whole system has fallen apart.

3

OK, baseball used to do something like that. Any other leagues? Surely there are other leagues that need to save travel money.