I'm by no means a great hunter, but common sense told me while watching a show one time that it didn't seem right to walk across the very crop fields the guys were planning on hunting. As if they knew I was calling them idiots, one immediately answered my questions about what they were doing. Their reasoning was that the deer come from the treelines, not the middle of the crop field. So, by walking across the field itself they limited their scent trail to just the section they walked through. Since it was the middle of a large field, there was less of a chance of being scented. If they'd walked along the treeline to their stands, they'd have chanced putting a scent trail along the entire treeline, thus increasing the chance of being scented by deer.
Seemed odd at the time, but it also made sense to me. Then again, I'm still a beginning hunter myself.