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Around 1 p.m. today at Tucson International Airport, the UA basketball team will board a chartered, non-stop flight to New Orleans.

The players will be in first class, the leg room befitting their large frames.

"They're not sitting with their chin between their knees, like they have to so often," UA coach Lute Olson said.

A few hours later, the Wildcats will touch down to end one of the most comfortable trips of the season.

During Pac-10 play, conference teams must fly coach. One week ago, UA players crammed into a Southwest Airlines flight to Los Angeles.

Even compared to that one-hour jaunt, flying to the Big Easy will be, well, easy. New Orleans is closer to Tucson than Pac-10 campuses in Seattle and Pullman, Wash.

"It's not that long a trip, frankly," Olson said. "It's really easy with the charter. You don't have to be there an hour, hour and a half before. You still go through security, but it's not like what it is otherwise. And any time you connect, things can get messed up.

"The charter's a whole lot easier."

Not that the Wildcats will have an improved chance of winning because of it.

The effects of travel on a team's performance in the NCAA basketball tournament were studied by geographic analysts last year. They examined the Big Dance trip of each team from 1985 to 2005 and could not establish a direct correlation between distance traveled and game results, geographer Brian Ward said.

Ward, Brian Davenhall and Bryce Wells wrote an abstract called "A Spatial Analysis of the NCAA Basketball Tournament," which was presented at the ESRI International User Conference last year in San Diego. The Environmental Sensitivities Research Institute makes Geographic Information Systems and mapping software.

The researchers measured out the Euclidien Distance — as the crow flies — from a school's home city to the game site. Before the new pod system — where teams stay closer to home — Ward said "there was no pattern at all" as to where teams were assigned.

The research team hypothesized that there was a strong correlation between length of travel and success. It cited Indiana's 1987 national title run, in which the Hoosiers traveled 47 miles for the first two rounds and 107 miles to the next two. It also suggested that Hawaii — which traveled 11,246 total miles to go 0-3 in the tournament during the study's 20-year time frame — was at a disadvantage.

One thing the researchers could not pinpoint was the nature of sports. Indiana won the title on a miracle buzzer-beater by Keith Smart, and Hawaii has rarely been very good.

It was impossible to draw a straight line between distance and success.

"If I could identify one specifically related to college sports, it's that you're dealing with 18-, 21-year-old kids," Ward said. "Emotionally, they're all over the map. They have academic rigors. I think that's why you see so many upsets and disparity between expectation and reality."

The job of the tournament's seeding committee is to not put good teams at a geographical disadvantage.

The committee runs a computer software system that assigns teams to locations based on numerous factors. For example, the committee will not place seeds 1 through 5 on any court that could feature a hometown crowd that favors an opponent. Changes in time zones are also taken into account.

"One of the things we really do track is mileage," said Gary Walters, chairman of the NCAA Division I men's basketball committee.

Olson saw that first-hand last year, when the UA traveled to Philadelphia for the first and second rounds.

"I think the biggest thing is what it does to your body if you're jumping across two time zones," Olson said. "I think when the committee makes their selections, they should try to avoid having people go two or three time zones."

The UA today will cross just one time zone but will encounter a two-hour time difference in its 1,249-mile trip to New Orleans, which is in the Central Time Zone.