Every year, professional athletes in every sport travel thousands of miles throughout the season. NBA teams criss-cross the country and into Canada for 82 games. MLS players go at it for an 8.5-month regular season for a total of 34 games (there’s a summer break). MLB has 162 games, the NHL has 82, and the WNBA season is 44 games. All of these athletes will fly across the country, and occasionally into other countries, every year.
In 2026, the NFL added a game in Melbourne, Australia, on top of the other international games, thus increasing the miles some NFL players will fly. Teams like the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams will travel over 30,000 miles in 2026 due to international trips like this one. The Washington Commanders are slated to travel 18,491 yards in 2026, 16th in the league.
BREAKING: The 32 NFL teams travel 628,873 miles this season. That equals 25.2 trips around the circumference of the Earth, or 2.63 times the distance to the Moon.
Six teams will travel more than the distance around the earth the equator – 24,901 miles.
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â Bill Speros (@billsperos) May 13, 2026
Now, we all know that every team travels and that the traveling team is often more tired than the home team, but what we rarely consider is the long-term impact of flying that much in such a short time. Fatigue is the main issue most people associate with traveling, but the risks increase when the flight is longer than four hours or when traveling great distances in a short time frame.
Astronauts’ bodies undergo a ton of changes when they go into space because of the radiation they face; they often lose bone density (among other things). Air travel isn’t quite that drastic; bone density problems don’t happen from air travel alone. What players and league administrators pay closer attention to is a player’s blood. Blood clots, deep-vein thrombosis (DVT) specifically, are more frequent and prevalent in air travel, even among professional athletes.
It wasn’t all that long ago that former NBA star Chris Bosh was the victim of a blood clot due to flying. That clot broke free from his leg (where it originally formed) and landed in his lungs, causing a pulmonary embolism. This is ultimately what forced him into retirement, and it’s partially why teams now have protocols on flights. Walking the aisles every couple of hours, compression garments, calf-raises, and other seated exercises to keep the blood flowing are all tactics the leagues use, especially for flights longer than eight hours.
The Commanders will have at least one time they travel by air for more than eight hours, which is when they go to London to face the Indianapolis Colts, but you can be sure they’ll employ all of these in-flight tactics to keep their players healthy, regardless of how long the flight is.
Overall, Washington will travel fewer miles in 2026, with most games in the Eastern and Central time zones. The Commanders have one trip overseas and two games out West against San Francisco and Arizona.
This article originally appeared on Commanders Wire: Washington Commanders: How many miles will they travel in 2026?
