When college football teams have received opportunities to play international games in recent years, they have invariably occurred either at the very start of the season or during the postseason.
Kansas and Arizona State will be the first teams to reckon with the novelty of a rare experience — the Union Jack Classic will make them the first power-conference football teams to play in the United Kingdom — with the regular season in full swing.
That means that as multiple KU players and coaches put it on Monday, ahead of their departure for London on Tuesday, it’s going to be a business trip.
“What an honor that it is to be the first team to really go over there and play,” defensive coordinator D.K. McDonald began. “Our guys should be excited about it.
“But the biggest thing we stressed … was at the end of the day, this ain’t a bowl game. You got to earn the right to go to bowl games and have that type of experience.”
Perhaps KU will get one of those down the line too; a victory over ASU would get the Jayhawks a step closer to the six-win threshold. To that end, they must make the most of their unusual circumstances. Already their approach has deviated from that of the Sun Devils, who went straight over following their 48-20 road loss at Texas A&M, and avoided having to go back and forth across time zones in the process.
There is no definitive answer to how teams should handle this sort of situation.
“Some say go really early, OK, our opponent went really early,” head coach Lance Leipold said. “Some say go really late. It’s kind of a mixed bag, really, of the results and where it’s at, so it’s still going to be a little bit on how your team plays.”
KU opted for a schedule in which it gets its heavy practice days out of the way on Monday and Tuesday, plus a Tuesday afternoon lift, right ahead of its flight out of Topeka.
“They got a whole app ready for us, just for jet lag,” said linebacker Quincy Davis, who will head overseas for the first time. “I guess we’re going to have certain times to sleep, certain times to be up, eat, they got it all planned out for us.”
Added cornerback Austin Alexander: “They’re telling us if the lights (are) on, we’re up. If the lights (are) down, we’re sleeping.”
How best to kill time? Center Kasen Carpenter is going to download some game film to watch on a team-issued iPad — and maybe a Netflix movie for good measure. Kicker Martin Connington has his eye on the “Harry Potter” film series.
Connington is a veteran of international travel whose father’s side of the family is from York, England, and he’ll carry the Union Jack out onto the field ahead of Saturday’s game. He said the hardest part of jet lag is staying awake throughout the initial day when you arrive.
The Jayhawks, for their part, will get to London on Wednesday morning, visit their hotel and do a light practice — “try to get the trip out of them and things like that,” Leipold said — before going to sleep at as normal a time as possible. Then comes another light practice on Thursday, followed by their sightseeing experience that includes a private rental of Tower Bridge.
Under their new game-week model, they will then have a “fast Friday” practice before the game on Saturday at 5 p.m. London time (11 a.m. Central).
“We can still make it a normal game week,” safety Corey Gordon said. “We just got to have that mindset it’s a normal game week, not worry about the situation at hand.”
The way associate head coach Andy Kotelnicki sees it, the Jayhawks are getting sent overseas to spread the word about “the greatest game,” American football.
“I said, ‘We’re going over there to show them what we do,'” he added. “Now if we get to happen to whatever they got, their landmarks and all that stuff, cool, right, but I’m there to play a football game and show them why we’re going over there to play this game.”
It doesn’t seem like the players will have much trouble mirroring that businesslike approach. Davis said they just have “to keep the main thing the main thing.”
“It’s nice we’re going overseas, but I don’t know nothing over there,” Alexander said. “I’m just really going to play football.”
