The bowl game is a wholly unique beast in a college football season. It is a postseason opportunity which must be earned, and it gives the players and coaches a further test against a national opponent. The travel, events, gifts and meals are welcome rewards, as well.
The operational differences between preparing for a bowl game and our other 12 regular season games are even more striking. Hotels, travel, meals, practice schedules and more are laid out months in advance for the regular season. We have to depart for El Paso in less than three weeks for the Sun Bowl.
When the phone call came Sunday to select Stanford to the 2016 Hyundai Sun Bowl, springs were uncoiled and we jumped into action. The first priority was to send a message to our team with the calendar for our practices on campus and the players' travel home and the bowl game. We had built five calendars several weeks ago for the five possible bowl games (Alamo, Foster Farms, Holiday, Sun and Vegas), before wins at the end of the season helped us mathematically eliminate Vegas to arrive upon four potential calendars.
The Vegas Bowl would have been the most challenging game for our student-athletes, with final exams week spent in Las Vegas amidst bowl practices and events. Some of the other games would have put our team at the respective bowl site during Christmas, which we have thankfully avoided the last seven years.
Our operations team of Matt Doyle (director) and Callie Dale (assistant director) had planned the calendars with head coach David Shaw, and Matt sent the message promptly on Sunday for our team's practices this weekend and again after the conclusion of final exams. All of our players will be able to fly home midday Dec. 20 and spend five and a half days together for the holidays with their families before we fly to El Paso the morning of Dec. 26.
NCAA rules permit Stanford to provide travel home, to the Sun Bowl and back home after the game. To ensure that players arrive at our El Paso hotel by noon on the 26th, we book flights for that morning from any city which flies direct to El Paso. For those who live where a connection is required, we are flying them back to campus the night of the 25th to join us on our charter jet the morning of the 26th.
The second order of business Sunday was to set the practice and bowl preparation schedule for our coaches. The bowl selection fell during the middle of the NCAA recruiting contact period, when our coaches are on the road all day every day criss-crossing the country to visit the schools and homes of our top scholar-athlete recruits in the 2017 class.
Balancing that recruiting calendar with the game planning and practices needed to win this important game is as much art as science. Stanford's coaches had been on the road all of last week, so we cut this week in half to allow the most essential home visits with our top recruits. By the time you read this, our coaches will have shifted gears fully into game planning.
The Sun Bowl selection on Sunday transpired during our annual team banquet, which brought the coaches back to campus for one day. Video director Mike Gleeson aimed to have the coaches armed with North Carolina film before they left town that evening or the next morning.
Video exchange between schools is nearly as old as the game itself. There is an unwritten rule – a gentleman's agreement in most eyes – that schools should have equal access to each other's game films. The scouting of that film and subsequent game planning is where coaches cut their edge. Today video exchange is accomplished electronically via large servers. It was not long ago that DVDs, tapes or reels were sent on airplanes, which video staff picked up at the airport.
The massive size of the video requires hours of transfer, including all of the accompanying data. Stanford layers Pro Football Focus data for each game on top of the video for analytics. After our Sun Bowl selection was made at approximately 1 p.m. Sunday, the first film breakdown was begun in our offices at 4:30 p.m. The games of greatest importance were loaded onto the tablets of our coaches before they departed town. Stanford's scouting of North Carolina began this week on airplanes and in hotels across the country.
Mike's video operation was swift and powerful. It hinges upon that gentleman's agreement of video exchange between schools, which has executed flawlessly for most of the last 20 years of bowl games. The one hiccup came in 1996, coincidentally a Stanford trip to the Sun Bowl. Mike reached out to his video counterpart at Michigan State to confirm that they were both sending film on flights that day, when the surprising answer came across the phone that the Spartans did not want to exchange yet.
Such gamesmanship was almost unheard of. Mike sprang into action calling his friends elsewhere in the Big Ten, successfully acquiring all of the games from Michigan State's season. By the time our opponent called back later that week, ready to then exchange video, Mike replied that the deal had changed. We only exchanged three games, a token offering after we had all that we needed. Whatever gambit Michigan State was attempting, it backfired. Stanford set several school bowl records in a 38-0 rout in El Paso.