LOS ANGELES — Toward the end of Greg Schiano’s short-lived coaching tenure in the NFL, he and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers flew roughly 3,000 miles from Florida to Seattle to play the Seahawks.
The Rutgers coach pointed out, at July’s Big Ten Media Days, that it was roughly the same distance from New Jersey to Los Angeles – 2,800 miles. He’d been through the details before, he reasoned. Football was football, he emphasized repeatedly, at any question trying to prod at the sheer reality of traveling cross-country in the Big Ten.
“At the end of the day, you gotta go out there and you got to block and tackle, you got to throw and catch, you got to play the game of football,” Schiano said that day in Indianapolis. “And I think sometimes people lose sight, they get all caught up in the semantics of the trips and things.”
But Schiano, still, could’ve never expected the conference he’d known for decades to suddenly feature USC. And as the first showdown in the two programs’ long histories dawns, those particular semantics look rather imposing when stacked together.
Rutgers is coming to L.A. on a short week – a Friday matchup completely shifting practice schedules, a few days after UCLA flew to New Jersey and knocked off the Scarlet Knights.
Rutgers will play at the Coliseum at 8 p.m. in a new iteration of Big Ten After Dark – kicking off a football game with all their body clocks set to 11 p.m. back home.
The Scarlet Knights will be dragging in a roster decimated by injuries – their two top tight ends, a starting left guard and an explosive backup halfback all ruled out for the season.
“We’ll see,” Schiano said, sighing, amid a response on Rutgers’ rash of injuries. “We’ll see who the 74 are that get on the plane. That’s a challenge too, right?”
Friday night’s contest will be fascinating in its novelty, pitting a home program struggling with the metaphysical concept of finishing games against an East Coast team that will have to physically counter being too tired to finish. After preaching the need to “separate,” as Trojans coach Lincoln Riley pointed out Tuesday amid a near-incomprehensible string of late losses, this 3-4 USC program has a golden opportunity for a cleanse against a Rutgers (4-3, 1-3 Big Ten) program that has to contend with a whole lot more than Los Angeles traffic.
Through the midway point of the season, Big Ten schools that have made a trip to or from the West Coast in a game involving the former Pac-12 programs, with any travel distance of more than 1,500 miles, are 5-11. The Friday night matchup is the kicker, forcing Schiano to completely rethink his travel philosophy.
Generally, Schiano’s programs have never flown out especially early to an away game on the West Coast, preferring to stay on Eastern time, he said in a press conference with local media Monday. It didn’t work in the NFL, nor in college.
But his hand was forced with Friday’s late kickoff, and Schiano told media that Rutgers was flying out Wednesday night and practicing Thursday in Southern California, a chance for players’ body clocks to adjust.
“At 2:30 in the morning,” Schiano said, referring to Eastern time, “hopefully the game is on the line. And I don’t like my decision-making at 2:30. And I don’t really like our players’ decision-making at 2:30, either.”
There hasn’t been an overwhelming amount of public outrage with the increased mileage in an expanded Big Ten, the most noise coming from Penn State’s James Franklin, who pointed out two weeks ago before a trip to USC that Penn State had to drive 90 minutes to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to fly out of an airport with a runway long enough for a larger aircraft. Riley’s comments on the topic, largely, have amounted similar to Schiano’s: football’s football. And there’s little mental-health issues that could arise from extended travel, Dr. Peter Economou, Rutgers’ director of behavior health and wellness for its athletics programs, told the Southern California News Group in the summer.
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“I mean, I think this is an age group that is resilient,” Economou said, speaking of the Big Ten transition’s effect on athletes’ mental health. “I don’t know if that’s going to be a popular response, but they’re resilient, they’re motivated, I mean, they’re excited. They want to do this.”
It’s hard to imagine, though, that this – flying westward early for a game played on body clocks set to the wee morning hours – is their ideal outcome.
USC (3-4, 1-4) vs. Rutgers (4-3, 1-3)
When: 8 p.m. Friday
Where: Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum
TV/radio: FOX (Ch. 11)/ESPN 710