Roughly 1,200 miles separate Ames, Iowa, from Orlando, Florida.

Ames is home to the campus of Iowa State University. And Orlando is where both Iowa State and Clemson have traveled within the last few days to prepare for their matchup in the Cheez-It Bowl, which is scheduled for 5:45 p.m. Wednesday at Camping World Stadium.

“I know on our end, coming from Ames to Orlando, there was no chance we were going to pass that opportunity up,” Iowa State coach Matt Campbell said Tuesday.

Clemson’s trip to the bowl site was about half that long (roughly 560 miles), but any sort of travel amid the recent spike in COVID-19 cases nationwide seems long and comes with held breath. While the Cheez-It Bowl is still on to be played as scheduled as of late Tuesday morning, coronavirus-related issues have impacted other bowl games around the country.

Four have been canceled while another has had a changeup in teams with many of Clemson’s ACC brethen being impacted the most. Virginia won’t play in the Fenway Bowl because of COVID-19 issues within its football program. The same goes for Boston College, which was supposed to play East Carolina in the Military Bowl. Meanwhile, Wake Forest will now play Rutgers in the Gator Bowl instead of Texas A&M, which is dealing with a recent spike in coronavirus cases.

“Your heart hurts for all of those people and teams,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said. “It’s an enormous amount of preparation that goes into getting ready for a football game, especially when you have this amount of time and all the things you’ve got to balance and plan for and do. It’s a lot.”

Even as they watched what was happening with those bowls, Campbell and Swinney said it never crossed their minds to pull their teams out of Wednesday’s game as long as they had enough players available.

“There’s been no thoughts of not playing or anything like that for us,” Swinney said.

Clemson and Iowa State have both been in Orlando since the end of last week after arriving at the bowl site on Christmas Even. Fans of both teams have also started making their way to central Florida in expectation of Wednesday’s game being played.

Beyond everyone getting their money’s worth when it comes to the game, Swinney said it’s also been important to provide his players and their families with the full bowl experience, something that didn’t happen last year. Swinney likened Clemson’s trip to New Orleans last season for its College Football Playoff semifinal matchup against Ohio State to a quick regular-season road trip where “we just went to our hotel and didn’t leave our rooms hardly” for two days.

“We’ve won a lot of bowl games and playoff games, but we really haven’t treated this any different than they playoff experiences,” Swinney said. “The cool thing for me, though, is we have a bunch of guys on the team that have never experienced a bowl because all the new people last year didn’t get a bowl (experience). And then you have a lot of new people this year, so it was really cool. They didn’t really know what to expect, so to watch them go through that has been a lot of fun. It’s been a great time.”

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been some bumps along the way for the Tigers, who will be without a few players Wednesday, including receiver E.J. Williams, because of COVID-19 protocols. Meanwhile, Iowa State hasn’t had any coronavirus-related issues to this point, Campbell said.

There are still more than 24 hours before the teams are slated to tee it up inside Camping World Stadium. But, all things considered, both coaches said they feel fortunate to still have one more game to play for the time being.

Both are well aware it could easily be the other way around.

“I just think you see the time and the effort that so many people have put into making this function go off that, to not have experiences occur, especially this late in the game, I think that’s really hard,” Campbell said. “Fortunately, from our end, we’ve been in a really great situation from a COVID standpoint.”

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