Cross-country road trips aren't a new thing for California coach Justin Wilcox, who has taken the Golden Bears into places like Auburn, Mississippi and North Carolina and come out with wins in recent years.
The trips will just become much more common for Cal and Bay Area rival Stanford now that the two schools are in their first season in the ACC, where the rest of the schools are on the other side of the country.
The Cardinal will play their first ACC game on Friday night at Syracuse, while the Bears play the following day at Florida State.
Wilcox said his team has the process down to a routine after winning at Auburn in a nonconference game two weeks ago. The Bears will practice at their normal time Thursday and then immediately get ready for the trip, leaving a day earlier than they would have for Pac-12 road games.
“We make it a race to see how fast we can get off the ground,” Wilcox said. “So locker room, buses take off as fast as possible, get out of there. Our team really enjoys it. We get to spend a lot of time together. ... We spend all Friday together. We get some downtime, we get some meeting time, we got some academic time. Obviously we get our walkthrough. You get your body clock ready. Our whole group seems to really enjoy it. We get to spend a lot of great time together.”
Wilcox said sometimes players will need to take a proctored quiz or exam on Fridays, but otherwise it's not much different than any other road trip besides the lengthier flight.
The Cardinal will also leave a day earlier than usual, heading to Syracuse on Wednesday for the Friday night game. Stanford won’t have to wait long for its second cross-country road trip with a game at Clemson next week. But with this week’s game on a Friday, coach Troy Taylor opted against staying back East between games to cut down on the travel.
The Stanford nutrition staff has already talked to the players about how to approach the long trip, which isn't much different from past road games at Hawaii or Notre Dame.
"One big thing our nutrition staff emphasizes a lot is just hydrating, especially on these long flights,” safety Mitch Leigber said. “Just try not to get dehydrated. So hydrating throughout the flight. A big thing for me is I try not to sleep on the plane as well, especially with this time change. I try not to throw off my sleep schedule. So those are just a couple of things I do just to try to stay focused throughout these long flights and not throw off my routine too much.”
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Cal and Stanford aren't the only two former Pac-12 teams set for their first long trips for games in their new conference this week. No. 11 Southern California will make its Big Ten debut on Saturday when the Trojans travel to face No. 18 Michigan.
UCLA, Oregon and Washington will get their chances for long conference travel soon enough. In all, the six schools from the Pacific Time Zone that left the Pac-12 for the Big Ten or ACC will play 20 conference road games in the Eastern or Central time zones, along with three other nonconference games.
The games in new venues are welcomed by many of the players, who are excited about the chance to play new teams that they might have long ties to from their past.
Stanford backup quarterback Justin Lamson spent two seasons at Syracuse and relishes the chance to play at the Carrier Dome as a visitor after switching schools before the Cardinal joined the ACC.
“It’s an electric atmosphere, so I’m excited to go back there,” he said. “Obviously when I signed with Stanford, I never thought we’d be playing Syracuse Week 3 my second year here. I’m excited to go there and play them.”
Cal quarterback Fernando Mendoza grew up in Miami watching the Hurricanes battle the Seminoles each year and now gets to play both those schools in his next two games with Miami set to come to Berkeley in two weeks.
“Me being from Miami, going to a ton of Miami-FSU rivalry games being like the highlight of my year when I was younger,” Mendoza said. “So it’s a big deal.”
