Once they finish practicing Friday, the Arizona Wildcats will grab a bag lunch, load their gear on a bus outside McKale Center and shuffle off to Tucson International Airport.
Again.
Thanks to Arizona’s unusually heavy schedule of road and neutral-site games this season, this will be the third of four straight weeks the Wildcats will be playing away from home. They flew to Las Vegas for Thanksgiving, to LA last week, to Columbia, Mo., this weekend and to Houston next week.
Yet for 7-footer Dusan Ristic and his teammates, it’s all a relative piece of cake.
Not only is any flight within the U.S. an easy one if you’re used to commuting home to Serbia — “that’s a tough 24 hours,” Ristic says — but the Wildcats are also chartering everywhere this season except their season-opening trip to Honolulu.
While charters average more than double the cost of flying commercial for the UA’s typical travel party of 45-50, they allow the Wildcats to save hours of travel time, and also to spread out in planes that often hold twice as many seats as they need.
Plus, big men Ristic, Lauri Markkanen and Chance Comanche get the exit rows reserved for them every time.
“It’s a great privilege for the whole team,” Ristic said. “We are grateful to all the people who provide charter flights for us. We fly less time. The flights are more comfortable, especially for big guys. It’s a huge thing.”
Ryan Reynolds, UA’s director of basketball operations, says there’s all sorts of time-saving benefits: There’s no need to bus to Phoenix or take connecting flights, checking in and clearing security are much faster, and the Wildcats can return home immediately after a road game, instead of having to stay overnight in many cases.
Even the charter airplane crew typically hops off right away upon landing to help the team gather its bags and get going.
“The obvious difference when you fly commercial, everything takes longer,” Reynolds said. “If you show up with a group of 40 at the airport to fly commercial, you have to check everyone in individually and that can be a half-hour to an hour process. You have to check bags and, in case anything goes wrong, you have to get there two hours early.”
That’s the logistical end of it. What UA coach Sean Miller likes is the big picture: How his team can get in quickly, then come back home right away to catch up on academics and get ready for the next game.
Plus, there’s a recruiting advantage to be able to tell players and their families that you charter everywhere, getting more rest and missing fewer classes, even though charter flights are becoming the standard among high-major programs.
Arizona’s opponent Saturday, Missouri, travels via charter, as do its Southeastern Conference opponents. Pac-12 teams have increasingly flown charter since the conference’s 12-year, $3 billion media rights package went into effect in 2012.
Miller said even Xavier chartered to Colorado for a game this week “because they want to be great,” and he finds the same mentality at Arizona.
“It’s the investment that we have made in our program — I know I’ve said this through my time — it separates us,” Miller said. “And sometimes it puts us on a par with a number of others who are doing that. …
“It’s not necessarily that the players get the whole row to themselves, or luxury, as much as it allows you to maximize your time and maybe do some things that you otherwise would not do.”
Of course, there’s considerable cost to all this. Arizona paid Allegiant Air $642,454 for its seven charter road swings last season, according to a contract obtained via a public-records request filed by the Star, and AD Greg Byrne says they will pay $707,353 for nine charter trips this season.
Arizona flew commercial for its season-opening trip to Honolulu for the Armed Forces Classic, and Byrne said that cost was paid for by event organizers.
While one-game trips such as this weekend’s can be cheaper because the plane stays in town with them, and the UA doesn’t have to pay the cost of a “deadhead” flight to and from Allegiant’s base in Las Vegas, the Wildcats’ four multiple-game Pac-12 trips averaged $93,740 in flying cost alone.
That can add up. Over the course of last season, using a conservative estimate of comparable commercial fares, the UA paid about $390,000 more to fly charter than if it bought tickets for commercial flights.
But the $642,454 charter total still represents only about 7 percent of the UA’s 2014-15 expenses of $8.98 million in 2014-15 — the most recent figures publicly available in the U.S. Department of Education’s database.
Byrne started allowing UA up to 12 one-way charter flights in 2011-12 and the Wildcats fly almost exclusively charter now, even to Los Angeles or Las Vegas, without a flight segment limit.
“We just have an overall budget for the basketball program,” Byrne said earlier this fall, “and Sean and the program have done a really good job of staying within it.”
Miller’s program is also the most profitable in the Arizona athletic department. UA men’s basketball reported revenues of $19.22 million in 2014-15, netting the athletic department $10.24 million.
Whether chartering generates more wins, though, is harder to quantify. Since 2013-14, UA has won 64.8 percent of its road games when it has chartered, and 90 percent of the games played (usually at home) immediately after them, when a charter flight has presumably allowed more recovery time.
But over that same period, Miller also began building consistent Top 25 teams with multiple Top 5 recruiting classes, suggesting the Wildcats were going to be pretty good wherever the played, and however they arrived there.
So maybe in the end, it’s best just to judge the cost against the big picture you see when the postseason rolls around. For Miller, at least, that equation works out pretty well.
“Everybody realizes the advantages across the board, and one of the advantages is you don’t get beat up physically and mentally as much as you would have by the time you get to February and March,” Miller said. “That’s when you want to really want to be at your best, and be a team with no regret. This building process occurs through the way you travel, and all of that really impacts your success at that point.”
