FIVE days away from the Super Bowl, the challenges facing the players of the New York Football Giants and the New England Patriots run a lot deeper than just the matchups you will be reading about all week and the competition on the field.
Regardless of whether it is a championship game in the CFL or NFL, title games in football are as much an exercise in focus and adaptation as they are a test of wills, and this exercise began in earnest with the arrival of both teams in Arizona last Sunday night. Some of these distractions are obvious -- like the allure of the nightlife and parties that always snare at least one player every year -- and some you probably have never even considered.
The first thing that strikes you as a player during championship week is that this is unlike any road trip you have ever been on before in football. This is the only road game on which you embark six to seven days in advance of the kickoff.
Road teams across every professional league in the world historically perform worse than their opponents do because of the way travel wears on you as a player -- but it's not just a long flight and an unfamiliar environment with which these two squads will have to contend as they prepare for the biggest game of their lives.
In my experiences playing in championship games in football (two), the way your diet and exercise schedules are affected by being on the road for a week are two obstacles right off the bat.
Whereas in a normal road trip where you probably only eat out the night before the game and maybe the morning of, you now have little choice but to dine at restaurants or off of room service for an entire week -- and as everybody knows, the nutritional and health makeup of most dining options do not compare to what you can buy or make at home. In fact, two of the simplest things to acquire and ingest while at home, essentials like fruit and bottled water that play huge roles in terms of hydration and cramp-prevention, become quite an inconvenience to acquire and store when you are living out of a hotel room for a week.
Players may work out up to three times a week before every regular or post-season game, which also becomes a major headache on the road. You tend to rely on scheduled transportation to take you to and from practice, which most likely does not adhere to your auxiliary workout schedule, and the presence of the opposing team practising before or after you at the stadium restricts your access to any in-house fitness options. Our singular option to lift weights this last Grey Cup game, which is definitely more of a mental requirement than a physical one with only one week left in the season, was presented to us -- at our request -- at a public facility in a gym in downtown Toronto.
Then, of course, there is the overwhelming presence and effect of the media that have amassed from all over the country, and in the case of the NFL, from all over the world. There are cameras awaiting you in the airport when you arrive, there are cameras all over your hotel, and there are cameras when you go out to eat or otherwise. You can be interviewed before practice, after practice, in your hotel room, on your cellphone, or shuttled to studios all over the city to go live on programs, which is something in which many of us participated with TSN and CBC last November.
The biggest impact of these requests is how it fills up your free time after practice where you would normally be resting or getting treatment. As beneficial as the added exposure can be for players in terms of national recognition, you have to be mindful of the task at hand and how to say no to the requests when they become overwhelming (see Milt Stegall at the '07 Grey Cup).
Everything being equal -- based on what we have seen during the regular season and playoffs from the New England Patriots and New York Giants -- the Patriots should win Sunday. When you factor in the number of players on New England's team that have experienced the surreal conditions that Super Bowl week is guaranteed to deliver (they have some 24 players with at least one Super Bowl ring), as opposed to many more of the New York Giants and their key players like Eli Manning who have never experienced or faced these lifestyle interruptions, that 14-point spread currently separating the two clubs suddenly becomes a lot more reasonable.
Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.
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