Stanford tight end Sam Roush was in a team meeting on Tuesday when the topic of the Cardinal’s 9 a.m. Pacific Time kickoff on Saturday came up.
A teammate responded: “There’s no time too early to go run through somebody’s chest.”
“We’re not too worried about the early start time,” Roush said. “I mean, it’s football. We’re going to wake up and play ball. That’s kind of the attitude we’ve got.”
Stanford knew when it joined the ACC that it was signing up for increased travel and earlier kickoffs. This Saturday at N.C. State (9 a.m., ACC Network) will be the last cross-country trip of the season, but also likely the most taxing – a fourth game in the Eastern Time Zone in seven weeks, and the first one to start before 12:30 p.m. Pacific.
The last time Stanford played a game that kicked off before noon Pacific Time was the 2018 Sun Bowl against Pittsburgh, the team’s most recent appearance in a bowl game. And it has never played four games in the Eastern Time Zone in one season – a mark it will set this year after taking trips to Syracuse, Clemson and Notre Dame between Sept. 20 and Oct. 12.
Stanford coach Troy Taylor said it will be the earliest start time of his coaching career. He’s encouraging players to go to sleep by 9 p.m. this week, and the team planned to travel to North Carolina on Thursday to give players more time to acclimate. They will also do most of their pregame work on Friday evening so the players can sleep in as late as possible on Saturday morning.
“It’s definitely something that I’ve never done but we’ll be up for the task,” Taylor said. “It’s a unique thing to wake up immediately and play. We’re typically waiting around all day doing meetings and stuff, just trying to pass the time before you play.”
Taylor was more concerned with another scheduling quirk: N.C. State (4-4, 1-3 ACC) is one of five opponents who will be coming off a bye before games against the Cardinal (Syracuse, Notre Dame, SMU, and Louisville are the others). In two of those cases (Syracuse and Louisville), Stanford shares a bye week with its opponent, but in three cases it does not.
“The early kick obviously is out of the norm of what you’re used to,” Taylor said. “The scenario that may be even more difficult is this is the third opponent that had two weeks to prepare for us, which, I have to be honest, I don’t know if I’ve ever lost a game where we had two weeks to prepare for an opponent. It gets you healthy, gives you time to recover, gives you two weeks to prepare for an opponent while they’re preparing for somebody else in the first week.”
Though Taylor is 5-15 at Stanford, he is 2-0 coming off a bye. The Cardinal (2-6, 1-4) won at Colorado last year, and recorded its only win against an FBS opponent this season when it won at Syracuse. In games where it faced a rest disadvantage this season, Stanford lost to Notre Dame 49-7 and to SMU 40-10, though the Cardinal were heavy underdogs facing ranked opponents in those games.
“That was kind of disappointing to see the schedule laid out that way,” Taylor said. “Obviously playing (at 9 a.m.) is a challenge as well, but honestly the byes for three opponents before you is, to me, more concerning.”
Roush said he has been preparing this week by going to bed by 9 or 9:30 and waking up earlier than usual. The team knows it also has a break after this exhausting stretch – an off week, and then three remaining games in the Bay Area (home against Louisville, at Cal and at San Jose State).
“We know we’ve got the bye next week,” Roush said. “So we’re not going to be worried about conserving anything, not that anybody ever is anyways.”