The Big Ten Conference and its football teams have given fans plenty to cheer about in its first year with four new members from the West Coast.

Although the University of Michigan won’t be defending its 2023 national championship, the top-seeded Oregon Ducks have a chance to keep the title in the Big Ten as the College Football Playoff kicks off (as do three other longer-tenured programs).

And U-M’s September matchup with the University of Southern California—the first meeting of the historic programs as in-conference opponents—was a thriller. On fourth down with less than a minute to go, the Wolverines scored a touchdown to secure the victory with a record-setting audience watching on TV.

But as the competition and excitement grow to new levels, so too do the carbon emissions from the teams traveling across the country to play each other.

According to a new report from the U-M Center for Sustainable Systems, the Big Ten’s 2024 expansion will more than double the average conference game emissions for the U-M football team. That’s compared with emissions from 2010 to 2023.

The CSS study also found that the same is true for the average emissions from opponents with the increased distances traveled to play at the Big House in Ann Arbor.

“I’m a big football fan, so I don’t want to see less football happening,” said Paige Greenberg, one of the study’s authors. “But I think this is an important conversation to start having.”

Squad sustainability goals

Greenberg and co-author Molly Russell, both graduate students at U-M, took on the project after being inspired, in part, by reporting on the sustainability of the 2024 Summer Olympics.

As they dug into the literature, they found that researchers at Arizona State University had recently studied emission changes associated with conference restructuring across college football. Russell and Greenberg adapted the approach from that report to focus on the University of Michigan and its opponents.

They found that the Big Ten’s expansions would multiply U-M’s average per game emissions by a factor of 2.3 and their opponents’ by a factor of 2.6.

They also found the combined emissions from U-M and their opponents for the 2024 regular season would be more than 350,000 kilograms, or almost 400 tons, of carbon dioxide.

“That’s equivalent to driving a small internal-combustion SUV around the Earth’s equator over 33 times,” Greenberg said.

That is, however, a relatively small slice of total emissions from the university, let alone college sports, the researchers said. For example, emissions from fan travel, which were not estimated, would be much greater, said study adviser Geoff Lewis.

But reducing U-M’s carbon footprint as the Big Ten’s geographic footprint grows would still be a meaningful change, Lewis said, especially as the university works toward carbon neutrality.

“The thing that kept popping into my head was ‘leaders and best,'” said Lewis, a CSS research specialist, referencing a famous line from the U-M fight song. “The university is stepping up in a lot of ways and this is another opportunity to do something creative or substantive.”

Lewis is also on the internal advisory council for U-M’s Scope 3 Emissions Project, which is working to reduce the university’s emissions from indirect sources such as travel and purchasing.

“The final recommendations from the firm we have engaged to support this work are expected in early 2025, after which U-M will establish Scope 3 goals—filling out U-M’s suite of carbon neutrality goals—and begin implementing reduction efforts,” said Katrina Folsom, the project’s manager with the Office of Campus Sustainability.

“We are fortunate to have an internal resource like the Center for Sustainable Systems, whose research can directly inform U-M’s sustainability efforts.”

Taking care of home field

Although the report was prompted by the expansion of the Big Ten, the result that most surprised its authors was connected to U-M’s out-of-conference opponents.

Their analysis revealed large fluctuations in these emissions—between about 60,000 and 275,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide—depending on where the opponents were from.

“Michigan rarely travels for nonconference games. People come to the Big House to play us,” Greenberg said. “So all of those emissions kind of fall on our opponents.”

In 2016, for example, Michigan’s first three opponents were the University of Hawaii, University of Central Florida and University of Colorado. As a result, those three games accounted for more than 60% of the combined season emissions for U-M and its opponents.

Seeing the emissions data in this light brings forward questions that the university can consider as it works to reduce indirect emissions.

“We bear some of the responsibility for putting Hawaii, UCF and these schools on our schedule,” Lewis said. “We should have a discussion about how we apportion these emissions to both schools.”

Starting discussions like that is the goal of emissions reports from the CSS, said Shoshannah Lenski, the center’s associate director.

“Michigan football is a cherished institution,” said Lenski, who is also an adviser on the report and on the advisory council for the Scope 3 Emissions Project. “Michiganders also love our Great Lakes and our beaches. We love our snowy winters and going up north to ski. We have to recognize the threat that climate change poses to all of those—including football.

“My expectation is the university, having taken a real leadership stance on all things sustainability, will be looking at every decision we make and asking, ‘What is its impact on emissions and is it worth it?'”