This year’s road trip to Reno, Nevada, presents a momentary obstacle for Kansas football coach Lance Leipold and his staff, but the broader issue of managing visits to West Coast destinations will persist — and even intensify.
The Jayhawks have games scheduled at Washington State in 2027, even farther west at Hawaii in 2028 and at Fresno State in 2029, all of which require crossing multiple time zones for games that frequently occur late at night. Not to mention the more immediate concern of league games in the forthcoming expanded Big 12 Conference at Arizona and Arizona State, programs that spend part of the year aligned with Pacific Time.
In short, while KU hasn’t played a game out west since a 2002 loss at UNLV, and hasn’t even played in Mountain Time since Colorado left the Big 12, these sorts of trips are about to become the norm.
“Once you build a template of what you want to do, mainly, of your Friday and your Saturday schedule, you just kind of slowly modify it from there,” Leipold said Monday.
UNLV running back Joe Haro scores on an 8-yard touchdown run in the first quarter against Kansas on Saturday, Sept. 7, 2002, in Las Vegas. In the rear are Kansas’ Tim Allen (90) and Tony Stubbs.
Kansas wide receiver Dezmon Briscoe, right, pulls in a pass for a touchdown as Colorado safety Ray Polk comes in to cover in the fourth quarter of Colorado’s 34-30 victory in an NCAA college football game in Boulder, Colo., on Saturday, Oct. 17, 2009.
Although Leipold previously played in Reno when he was at Buffalo, constructing that template has been a challenge for Saturday’s game in Nevada for several reasons. The team has chosen to shift the times of some of its meetings and give its players some extra sleep afterward to account for what is a 9:30 p.m. Central Time kickoff. That is the latest KU has started a game this century, if not ever. (Since 2002, the closest it got was 2020, when it kicked off a pandemic-altered game in Lawrence against Coastal Carolina at 9 p.m. for increased TV exposure.)
KU is choosing to sleep over in Reno to let its players get some rest, rather than effectively taking a red-eye back to Lawrence, but as a result, the NCAA is counting Sunday as a workday for the team, Leipold said, meaning that the Jayhawks will need to practice Sunday night on short rest after they get back and take Monday off, rather than resting and resuming Monday.
“Why we don’t change the rule right now, I don’t have any understanding,” Leipold said. “We say we do all these things for the players but we don’t. All we want to do is get them up, get them a good night’s sleep in a bed, get them back, give them the rest of the day off, but right now the rule in the Autonomy 5 (conferences) doesn’t allow us to do that.”
The hope for KU is that the Monday off day will help the team reestablish a regular rhythm entering its next game at home against BYU, which was announced Monday to take place at 2:30 p.m. Sept. 23 on ESPN.
“It’s almost like getting back used to another routine of getting back to playing on Saturdays,” running back Devin Neal said after KU beat Illinois on Friday.
In the meantime, the Jayhawks have to play their last nonconference matchup in Reno, with some physiological disadvantages. Sleep science shows that teams traveling west across time zones generally do worse in night games because they play after their peak hours for physical performance have already passed. Another challenge KU may face is that its players are less acclimated to the elevation at Mackay Stadium (4,610 feet).
Leipold characterized that as a minor factor for which the team’s August camp would help prepare it.
When his Buffalo team played at Nevada, he said, “We were in the second year of building and we weren’t as good as we hoped. We were a 2-10 football team that year so we had other things to worry about other than elevation.”
Nevada quarterback Tyler Stewart looks to throw against Buffalo in the third quarter of an NCAA college football game in Reno, Nev. on Saturday, Sept. 17, 2016.
He added, though, that the training and medical staffs will discuss the matter in advance of the trip. On the whole, the staff is continuing to work through its plans for the week ahead of the game.
“Our players will adjust well,” he said drily, “I just hope I can stay awake long enough for the end.”
Nick Krug
AP Photo/Joe Cavaretta
AP Photo/David Zalubowski
AP Photo/Tom R. Smedes