Georgia high school football teams facing long road trips in first round of playoffs

Northwest Whitfield is eight miles from the Tennessee border but will be eight miles from the Atlantic Ocean on Friday night when the Bruins play Jenkins at Memorial Stadium in Savannah. That 350-mile trip isn’t the longest of the first round. That distinction goes to Glynn Academy’s 377-mile trip to Rome’s Barron Stadium. The GHSA this year made playoff format changes in all sports that increased the likelihood of these long-distance relationships. In past years, regions 1-4 (which house the more southerly teams in a classification) and regions 5-8 (the more northerly teams) could not face off in the first round. This year, first-round pairings have Region 1 teams vs. Regions 7 teams and Region 2 teams vs. Region 8 teams. The GHSA’s new points ratings system that seeds classes 3A to A Division I does not consider region affiliation, making first-round matchups geographically random. Those changes have contributed to more first-round travel. The average one-way road trip is 109 linear miles this season compared to 94 in 2023. Linear miles are faster to calculate than road miles. Assuming that road miles are 20-25% longer than linear miles, it can be estimated that first-round playoff teams are traveling an extra 36 round-trip miles on average this season. Here are the longest trips in driving miles this week.

377 - Glynn Academy at Rome

363 - Camden Co. at North Cobb