Sure, NFL players are bigger, faster and stronger than the rest of us. And they can brush off the physicality and pain that comes with playing professional football.
But when it comes to going straight to work after traveling overnight on a seven-hour, 3,000-mile flight across the pond, fatigue hits you no matter how much you can bench press or squat.
“I’m tired,” Commanders linebacker Odafe Oweh said on Wednesday afternoon, just a few hours after the team landed in London for Sunday’s game against the Colts. “But that comes with the territory of the blessing of being in this position.”
Washington has put a lot of time and resources into quickly acclimating the players’ bodies and minds to the five-hour time difference from the East Coast. The team’s medical professionals have studied and analyzed the best methods to make this trip feel as close to a normal work week as possible.
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But at the end of the day, tired is tired. And if the Commanders want to win their second game in a row to get back to .500, they’ll need the roster as fresh as possible.
“It’s great being out here in London, change of scenery,” running back Bill Croskey-Merritt said. “It’s the same plan as if we was back home. Just out here working, just preparing to be the best we can be, and everything else will take care of itself.”
The Commanders getting here early on a Wednesday for a game four days away was a strategic decision. The travel debacle involving the 49ers-Rams Week 1 game in Australia — in which San Francisco elected to travel the nearly 8,000-mile journey a week before to the Sept. 10 game, while Los Angeles opted for the day before and lamented the decision following a blowout loss — has spotlighted the varied ways teams decide to handle international games. The Colts chose to arrive on Friday.
Head coach Dan Quinn wanted this week’s preparation to match the attitude, effort and practice habits of any other week, even with the team sequestered at a golf resort in the London countryside as opposed to the data center-lined streets of their team facility in Ashburn, Virginia.
Their flight was scheduled for Tuesday evening at around 7 p.m. to give the staff more time to game-plan for the Colts. Quinn was able to have his normal meetings with his assistants and the entire roster on Monday and Tuesday. After landing at about 8 a.m. on Wednesday, they had meetings and a “jog”-through instead of the typical walkthrough that afternoon to not further stress their bodies following the overseas flight. Thursday and Friday will follow the normal practice schedules and intensity. (When the Commanders played the Dolphins in Madrid last season, they left on the Monday before the game as opposed to Tuesday this season.)
The players have everything they need here. A makeshift gym was set up in a greenhouse shed right off the practice field. Their living quarters are within walking distance of practice and the facilities they use for film study, which cuts down on additional travel while in London.
“It’s like being back in college,” Quinn said. “Go to school in the classroom and you come out to practice. And that’s a big deal for us, knowing that we have all the setup that we need to stay in a really good process here.”
The player performance staff, which includes Geoff Kaplan, the senior director of player health and performance, team clinician Dr. Erica Force, and Nick Farrell, the director of performance nutrition Nick Farrell, created plans for everything from hydration and nutrition to plane rest to make the travel as seamless as possible.
For instance, they required players to sleep on the plane ride over and not nap once they made it to the United Kingdom to acclimate to British Summer Time.
That’s easier said than done for some members of the team.
Defensive tackle Daron Payne is 6-foot-3 and 320 pounds. Even the most luxurious and spacious lie-flat seats have problems accommodating him.
“I’m a big guy,” Payne said. “We got the laydown beds, but it wasn’t really too comfortable. I might have gotten a couple hours of sleep.”
The time difference probably won’t bother running back Austin Ekeler as much. He welcomed his first child in May, so he’s used to functioning on minimal sleep.
“I’m in the dog days of being a dad and waking up every two, three hours to feed little baby Ronan,” said Ekeler, who signed with the Commanders on Tuesday after tearing his Achilles last season while with the team. “At this point, I don’t care if I’m tired. I’m gonna be tired, just keep working through it.”
Quarterback Marcus Mariota may be best-equipped to handle travel like this. The Hawaii native has regularly flown the six-plus hours from the island to the mainland, and during organized team activities this past summer he would take red-eye flights from D.C. to Oregon to be with his wife and two daughters.
“I feel like I’m a veteran when it comes to cross-country travel,” Mariota said.
The biggest adjustment for the 12-year veteran was having to miss out on his normal Tuesday night routine of putting his daughters to bed.
“I really enjoy those moments with the kids,” Mariota said.
These international games are about expanding the marketing reach of the NFL; there will be a record nine international games this season.
But for the teams, the objective is the same whether they’re at home or thousands of miles away. So when Croskey-Merritt was asked if he was looking forward to seeing any of the sights in London, he was clear about the single thing he wanted.
“Just want to win, win and go home. That’s about it,” he said.
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