One of the best inside views of pro football is Jerry Izenberg's "No Medals for Trying", a behind-the-scenes, all-access look at six days with the New York Giants in November 1989. The book chronicles the preparation for a Sunday home game against the Philadelphia Eagles with the Giants coming off a Monday night loss in San Francisco.
The book opens with the Giants boarding a plane at 11:30 p.m. in San Francisco, medical staffers tending to an array of injured players on an overnight flight and Bill Parcells and his crew reporting to Giants Stadium not long after they land around sunrise at Newark Airport.
(T)he coaching staff staggers into its floor of offices. While they begin to draw up the game plan for the Eagles, Parcells closes the door
to his office, collapses on the small couch, and tries to silence the tug-o'-war which has been going on in his mind between the Ghosts of the 49er Game past and the Eagles Game Yet to Come. He will sleep for exactly ninety minutes.
The scene shifts to a coaches' conference room at 8:45 a.m.
Ron Erhardt, the offensive coordinator, stares at the automatic coffee machine on the corner counter in the big utility room through eyelids that seem to be sinking in an ocean of concrete. He is not to be confused with Al Groh, the linebacker coach, who is clutching his Styrofoam cup as though it weighed forty pounds and contained pure nitroglycerin. In tandem, their eyes look like the bottoms of separate but equal bloody Mary glasses. Both, like the rest of the staff, are now in the twenty-sixth hour of what will become a thirty-nine hour, three-time-zone day.
Maybe it wasn't quite that taxing for the Texas Tech football staff over the weekend. The Red Raiders won, which always helps, on their trip to the Pacific Time Zone and they had to fly only halfway across the country to get home, not from coast to coast.
But their "No Medals for Trying" challenge, and the week they didn't ask for, is here. It's that six-day turnaround from the Oregon State game in Corvallis to the Friday-night home game against Houston that had the Red Raiders so irritated back in March and April.
Cody Campbell blamed Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark for not protecting the Red Raiders from a TV-selected Friday night game — in Texas, where the Friday night lights of high-school football are sacred, the Tech Regents Chairman complained. Yormark countered by telling the Avalanche-Journal, "Cody Campbell does not run the Big 12."
This week is about who runs the football side of the Big 12. Tech and Houston are two of the conference's four ranked teams.
The Cougars finished a home game on Saturday when Tech was still playing at Reser Stadium. It was after midnight Lubbock time when the Red Raiders took off from the airport in nearby Eugene, where they stayed.
"We got back at 4:30," McGuire said Monday, "so I probably got in bed at 5. We didn't start our day yesterday until 2 with the players, so hopefully they got some really good sleep. I think that's the biggest thing. You're losing a day, but playing on the road, getting back at that time, playing on the West Coast is the biggest thing."
Time in the air for coaches wasn't time to relax. Tech assistants graded the Oregon State film on the plane, had it on the head coach's desk midday Sunday and started grinding on the Cougars. They stayed late at the Womble Football Center.
Tech players normally have their NCAA-mandated day off on Monday before the heaviest game-prep days on Tuesday and Wednesday.
This week, they lose one of those heavy prep days with one less day in full pads. On Monday, instead of practicing in full pads as they normally would four days before a game, the Red Raiders were going in helmets and spider pads, the lighter, thinner, foam version of shoulder pads.
McGuire's staff usually does video breakdown of the first four opponents in the summer, so they already had a handle on the Cougars when the week started.
"The difference between [a normal week and] this week more than anything is the amount of time from the last time you hit somebody until the next time you hit somebody," McGuire said. "You lose a day in there. Trying to get our sleep back into a regular pattern. And then, normally our first practice, we're in full pads and it's our most physical day. Our first day of prep for Houston is going to be one of our least physical days."
The challenge is real. Bill Parcells' staff didn't conquer it. The Giants lost on Monday Night Football to the 49ers and six days later to the Eagles.
For the Red Raiders, the potential for the short-week sweep is still on the table.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Here's how Texas Tech football tackles short-week challenge | Williams
