Sync your search settings, travel history, and saved trips across devices. Just a username and password — no email needed.
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Share picture
Two pictures of this route to share. The wide one suits link previews, the tall one suits posting.
When did you go?
This is the date on the stamp.
Travel log
Your saved trips, and your Passport: the places you’ve been and want to go, with a stamp for each game you’ve seen.
Saved trips
A saved trip keeps the settings that produced it, not just the route. "View" shows the route exactly as you saved it. "Re-run with fresh data" searches again with today's schedules, so it can come back different.
to save trips and see them here.
No saved trips yet. Plan a route, then use "Save this trip" under your results.
Passport
Your personal travel record. Mark the cities, teams and venues you've already been to, and the ones you still want to see. The map fills in the states, and the Canadian provinces along the border, that you've covered. Pick the goal New states or provinces and GameDetour leans toward places you haven't been; pick My bucket list and the places you want to go are added to Must include for you.
Been there
Through a city
Not yet
Loading the map.
Stamps
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Want to go
Been there
Saved to this browser only — create an account to keep it for good.
Clears the form choices, favorite teams, want-to-go list and map states this browser remembers. Places you’ve marked as visited, your account and your saved trips stay.
Your account
Signed in as .
How it works
Questions people ask, in plain answers. Tap a question to open it.
The basics
What does GameDetour do?
You tell it where you’re starting, when you can travel and which leagues you like. It looks up the real schedules and the real drive times between every venue, then finds the best set of games you could actually get to. You get a route you could really drive, not a wish list.
What makes a trip possible
These are rules, not preferences. If a drive breaks one of them, that combination of games is dropped, however good it looks otherwise.
How are drive times worked out?
Every leg is checked against actual road routing between the two venues, not distance in a straight line.
How early do I have to arrive?
At least an hour before the game starts: enough to park, walk in and be in your seat before the anthem. Arriving right as the game starts doesn’t count as making it.
What if a game ends late and the next drive is long?
If a game ends at 9 PM or later and the next drive is 4 hours or more, GameDetour has you rest and start fresh at 8 AM instead of driving through the night. The same applies if driving straight through would put you on the road in the middle of the night anyway. Drives under 4 hours skip this, since nobody waits until morning to drive 90 minutes home.
What if a drive is longer than my daily limit?
It isn’t thrown out. It’s spread across as many days as it needs, with an overnight rest in between, as long as your trip has room on the calendar for it.
Can I see a game on my last day?
Not unless the whole trip is a single day. The day you’re due back is for driving home, so you’re never racing the clock to get there.
Is there a limit on how far it will go?
Yes. GameDetour won’t chase a stop more than about 3,200 miles one way. Past that, it isn’t a realistic drive for this kind of trip, whatever the calendar says.
What about a game with no announced time?
It still counts. The whole day is held open for it, since nobody knows yet when it will start.
How the best route is picked
Once a set of games is possible, it competes with every other possible set.
Does the order of the games matter?
Every game has a fixed start time, so the calendar already decides the order you’d visit them in. GameDetour’s job is choosing which games, out of everything available, are possible and worth including.
How does GameDetour choose between trips that work?
Games you must include come first. After that, games that match your Goal count the most, then your favorite teams’ games, then everything else. Of all the trips that work, the one with the highest total wins; with no Goal chosen, that simply means the most games.
Show the numbers
Each kind of game gets a weight: how many times more it counts than an ordinary game.
Must include picks
×10
For all practical purposes, a requirement. If it can possibly fit, it gets fit, even if the route looks less tidy. A city or venue you add needs one game; once it has one, its other games count like any other.
A game that matches your goal
×5
Your Goal (a league or two, your favorite teams, or states you haven’t been to) makes matching games count five times as much as an ordinary one. It leans the trip toward them without removing the rest.
A favorite team’s game
×2
Counts double in every search, so it wins out over an ordinary game when GameDetour has to choose. A thumb on the scale, not a demand. It stacks with your Goal.
An ordinary game
×1
The baseline. Every real game you can make it to counts toward a better trip, and more of them is what GameDetour maximizes by default.
What does Goal do?
Goal is what you most want from the trip: the most games, games in a league or two, your favorite teams, new states or provinces, or your bucket list. Matching games count five times as much (see the weights above) and nothing else is removed. Bucket list fills in Must include for you with the places you’ve marked as want to go in your Passport.
What does Must include do?
It lets you insist on something: a specific game (up to 4), a city or a venue. Each is in your route whenever it can possibly fit. A city or venue needs just one game, and GameDetour picks which. Add the state to a city (Columbia, SC) to be exact. Use the “+ Specific game”, “+ City” and “+ Venue” buttons.
What does Trip style do?
It doesn’t score anything. It’s a filter on how far the route may double back on itself: Straight shot (no backtracking), Scenic route (a little backtracking for a worthwhile detour) or Chase everything (no limit). It can drop a great game if reaching it would backtrack too far for your style, but it never makes one allowed route score higher than another.
Dates, places and leagues
Where do I start and end?
Starting from is where you leave. On a One way trip, Ending at is where you finish instead of driving back to the start. Your Home city, from Your defaults, fills in Starting from.
What does “Flexible dates” do?
With Exact dates, you give a Leave on and a Return on date. With Flexible dates, you give the earliest and latest day you could leave, plus a trip length, and GameDetour tries every departure day in that window and keeps the best trip.
Can I set exact times?
Yes, to the minute. The times sit behind the “Leaving at …, back by … · change times” line. On a one-way trip, the return time is the time you need to arrive by.
What is Quick start?
Three one-click fills: Weekend getaway (2 days, at most 3 hours of driving a day, Straight shot), Week-long trip and Two weeks, any start day. Only the last one switches to “Flexible dates”. Everything they set stays editable, and they don’t open the Customize panel.
Which leagues are included?
Only the ones you pick. Nothing outside your list is ever considered. FBS and FCS are the two levels of college football, and CBA is college baseball. College basketball comes in two halves: CBB Maj (college basketball, major conferences) is any game with a team from the ACC, Atlantic 10, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, SEC, West Coast or Mountain West, and CBB Mid is every other Division I game.
Customize your trip
Can I limit how many games?
Yes, with Max games. It’s a hard ceiling, for when you want a shorter trip even though more games would fit. However you set it, a trip never has more games than days: on average, one a day (a 14-day trip has at most 14 games). Trips can be up to 17 days long.
Can I limit how much I drive?
Yes, with Most driving per day. A drive longer than this is split across several days instead of being refused. Your Usual driving per day, from Your defaults, fills it in.
What does “First game near my starting location” do?
It requires your first stop to be within about 30 minutes of where you start. Closeness is judged by distance, not an exact drive time, and the usual “can you make it in time” check is skipped for that one leg.
What do the game filters do?
Skip exhibition games (on by default) drops preseason games and exhibitions against small schools outside Division I. Ranked matchups only keeps games with a top-25 college team. Indoor venues only keeps venues we know are covered.
Can the same team show up twice?
That’s the Same team more than once? setting. Yes (no restriction), No (each team at most once), or only for your favorite teams.
Your defaults, Passport and account
What are Your defaults?
Settings that stay the same from trip to trip, under Your defaults on Plan: your Home city, your usual driving per day, and whether you can travel internationally (unticked, only U.S. games are considered). Each one fills in its field on the form, and you can change it there for a single trip.
How do favorite teams and avoid lists work?
Favorite teams’ games count double in every search. To chase them, pick My favorite teams as your Goal. Teams and cities you avoid are dropped before anything else runs; add the state to a city to avoid just that one. A Must include pick is never vetoed by an unrelated entry on an avoid list: the pick wins.
What is the Passport?
It’s your personal travel record, on the Travel log page. Mark the cities, teams and venues you’ve already been to, and the ones you still want to see. The map fills in the states you’ve covered. The goal New states or provinces leans toward places you haven’t been, and My bucket list adds the places you want to go to Must include.
Do I need an account?
No. Planning a trip, Your defaults and your Passport all work the moment you load GameDetour. Sign in only if you want your settings and Passport remembered the next time you visit, or to save trips. Saving trips is the one thing that needs an account, since a saved trip has to live somewhere. It takes just a username and a password, with no email address needed.
Credits
Last updated
Game schedules and teams
Games, times, venues and team names come from ESPN's public data feeds. GameDetour is not affiliated with ESPN, any league or any team.
Map outlines come from Natural Earth (public domain), US Atlas by Mike Bostock (ISC license, built from US Census Bureau boundary files), and Statistics Canada boundary files for parts of Canada's Great Lakes coast.
Places and postal codes
US cities, towns and their populations come from the US Census Bureau's 2024 Gazetteer and population estimates.
Canadian places, US ZIP codes and the first three characters of Canadian postal codes come from GeoNames, licensed under CC BY 4.0. The data was filtered and reformatted for GameDetour.
Fonts and code
The fonts are Schibsted Grotesk and GameDetour Display (a modified Smooch Sans), both under the SIL Open Font License.
D3 and TopoJSON draw the maps, under the ISC license.
How the site pays for itself
GameDetour is free to use. It will be paid for with ads from Google and with commissions on some ticket links, at no extra cost to you.
Trademarks
Team and league names, and the X logo, belong to their owners. GameDetour uses them only to identify games and to link to its own account.
Contact
Found a wrong stadium, a missing game, or something that doesn't work? Tell us here. We read every message.
We save your message, the topic you pick, the line below if you fill it in, and the time you sent it. Nothing else about you is saved with it. We can't send email from this page, so if you'd like an answer, tell us how to reach you.
Live example · a real route
Your next trip, already on the map.
Pick where you’re starting and when you can go. GameDetour finds the pro and college games you can reach, in a route you could actually drive.
The route
From the first mile to the last. No spreadsheet.
Every stop from the map above, in driving order — full matchups and game times for each one.
Your route
Drive times are estimates and don’t account for traffic.
As scheduled at the time of this search — a league between seasons, or a playoff picture not yet set, simply won’t have games here yet.
Pro and college leagues, checked at once — then put on the map.
Keep what you plan.
An account saves your trips and remembers your preferences. Nothing more. There’s no email, so keep your password safe.
