The college football season is tough.
Now, consider the added challenge that conference realignment provides through the often-criticized travel schedule, which requires student athletes to make midweek trips cross-country — often to their detriment.
After the conclusion of Week 8, Big Ten teams are 5-11 in conference games where they have to travel over multiple time zones.
Six of those losses came when a team traveled from the western part of the country to the east — something the Ducks just experienced and will do again two more times before the season’s end.
This reimagined Big Ten conference has become the epitome of tough collegiate travel schedules due to the cross-country trek that some teams must make for match ups. For example, this past weekend, UCLA traveled 2,794 miles to Piscataway, NJ to take on the Rutgers Scarlet Knights for a standard conference game.
That was one of three games this past weekend that included teams traveling through multiple time zones. Three West Coast teams traveled east this week, and two pulled off wins — USC lost in College Park to the Terrapins while Oregon handled Purdue in West Lafayette.
Some would say the No. 1 Ducks’ toughest tests of the regular season have passed, but the 4,464 miles left of a season that will end up totaling 15,222 miles says otherwise. In the Ducks’ two final road trips of the season, the total travel amounts to just under half of the 9,172 miles that Oregon ventured last season. This adjustment seems to have fatal consequences for teams making these treks.
That’s not how senior guard Marcus Harper II — who attended high school just an hour away from fellow Big Ten member Northwestern — sees it, however.
“If you don’t make that travel on the regular and don’t know how to handle it. I kind of know how to do it, again the biggest thing is just sleep and eating and making sure you decrease inflammation in the body,” Harper said in the week leading up to Oregon’s trip to Purdue. “We’re going to Indiana, changing time zones, that plays [a large] part in terms of swelling and everything in the body. Just making sure you can get that recovery up.”
Harper, one of the team’s many grizzled veteran leaders, has traveled a fair amount in his 41 career games with the Ducks, but never experienced anything like the mission the team just undertook for a conference game at Purdue.
Harper has the correct idea when it comes to the best way to reduce the negative effects of travel.
According to the National Library of Medicine, the best way to reduce effects such as travel fatigue is to maximize sleep, adjust food and hydration strategies and make sure that light exposure and exercise coincide in order to stimulate the body adequately.
With the different time zones, it’s not so much the length of travel, it’s more that college teams cannot arrive super early and acclimate themselves to the time difference, which throws off crucial parts of the system like the circadian rhythm and metabolism. Sleep, eating and hydration have the most clear-cut, positive impact on recovery.
“Sleep, sleep, sleep…get acclimated to that timezone real quick because you gotta play a game. If you’ve never done that before, it’ll mess with you a little bit,” Harper said.
It’s no secret that Oregon tends to appeal to recruits from the west, given its location, so much of the team may be limited in the amount of experience they have traveling this long for a short period of time.
“You’re bumping over those time zones, you got to get active real quick, hydration is a big thing too, you got to make sure you’re hydrated. I know you don’t want to [hydrate] on the plane, but that’s the biggest thing,” Harper said.
It’s absolutely on-brand for this Oregon team to have every base covered, especially the often talked about travel schedule for most of the Big Ten. Nothing catches Dan Lanning by surprise — this is the No. 1 team in the country we’re talking about.
This team has prided itself on its attention to detail and commitment to doing everything the right way, which is epitomized in how the team treats long, eastbound travel, especially in a shortened week. The commitment to this specific kind of excellence is sparked by trust in veterans like Harper, who know exactly the capabilities of a team that works to check off every single box possible.
“You gotta get a lot of sleep…just to get ahead of the process and even make it neutralized. So, you can do all the treatment in the world, but the best treatment is just sleep,” Harper said. “Luckily, I’m from [the Midwest], so [my teammates] can ask me if they need some help.”
