This is a big road trip for Stanford football. The Cardinal takes their 1-0 record back to North Carolina to battle Wake Forest. Wake Forest is a solid program in the ACC which will be hard enough but Stanford’s biggest challenge may just come from the time of day. A noon Eastern kickoff will work against Stanford players and their body clock.
History shows that west coast teams, be it college or the NFL, struggle when they travel east and play what is a morning game on the west coast. The most recent example is last year when Cal flew to Maryland in body if not soul and got punished 35-27. The game was nowhere near as close as the score indicates. Cal got beat early before they woke up and scored 21 points in the fourth quarter and 14 of those in the final six minutes of the game.
Cal of course returned the favor to Maryland last weekend by scheduling a 7pm kickoff and then crushing the Terrapins 52-13.
“It is interesting the trend in college when an east coast team plays a west coast team, each coach it seems tries to screw the other team as much as they possibly can,” Coach Jim Harbaugh said this week “The east coast teams are going to schedule the game at noon, when the west coast team plays they are going to make it as late as they possible can.”
Last year Stanford had their game in the state of Texas moved up to early afternoon because of an approaching hurricane. It made for a morning kickoff in California and Stanford could not get on track as TCU beat them 31-14.
“We are taking this as a challenge,” Tight end Coby Fleener says. “Last year we went to TCU with the time change and got our butts kicked. So this year we have a plan put in place to take care of that. We are preparing in the best way we know how and we are going to work our butts off.”
The plan includes some very early wake up calls this week. Players were awakened at 6:30am on Monday and Tuesday, 5:30am on Wednesday and then 4:30am on Thursday. Lights out has been occurring shortly after 9pm each night.
“We are taking an Olympic approach to it,” Harbaugh says. “Our doctors have a template. It is how they treat Olympic athletes when they are going three time zones or more. So that is what we are following in terms of hydration and sleep patterns. Scientific!”
The team will fly to North Carolina on Thursday rather than the normal Friday departure. Another big change, players will not be allowed to sleep on the plane. Harbaugh says the players will be sent to bed pretty much on arrival at the hotel on Thursday night, so he wants his players nice and tired when they get there so they can get a good night’s sleep.
“I thought it was a joke at first,” safety Delano Howell said about hearing the news of no sleep on the airplane. “But they said ‘no we are serious, you can’t go to sleep on the plane.’”
The players seemed less excited about that rule than the early alarm clocks they have been hearing this week. “They may have to walk by me a few times, that is a 5-hour,” Howell chuckled.
Wake Forest has built their programming into a solid top-25 team. They are coming off a loss at home to Baylor in week one and will look to ratchet up the play in game two. They are a formidable foe regardless of the time of day. So Stanford must find a way to minimize the fact that it is a 9am pacific kickoff so they can concentrate on the game at hand.
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STANFORD VS WAKE FOREST GAME NOTES
Comments
Very interesting approach to travel - great reporting Dave!
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