Clemson’s trip to California will require more than a flight across the country and a few adjusted clocks.
The Tigers have spent roughly a year preparing for it.
Clemson will make its first trip to Cal this week for a Friday night ACC matchup in Berkeley, a game scheduled for 10:30 p.m. ET.
The unusual combination of a short week, cross-country travel and late Eastern kickoff has forced Dabo Swinney’s program to rethink its normal road routine.
“We’ve been working on it for a year,” Swinney said. “The ops team went out there a year ago, but we talked to people and different things as far as what’s the best thing that we should do.”
The answer: get to California early and attempt to recreate a normal Clemson football week nearly 2,500 miles from home.
Clemson plans to fly west Wednesday, giving the Tigers two days in California before Friday night’s game.
Instead of conducting its Thursday practice at home before traveling, the Tigers will practice after arriving in California at a nearby community college.
“We’ll get out there about three o’clock,” Swinney said. “We’ve got a little meeting space there. Then we’re going to try to practice at kickoff time tomorrow night, kind of have our Thursday practice around 10 o’clock our time, seven o’clock out there.”
The idea is to get the travel out of the way and give Clemson’s players time to adjust before Friday night.
“Let’s get them there and then let’s reset them,” Swinney said. “We’ll have meetings and our normal Thursday practice out there.”
The logistics extend far beyond the players and coaches.
Swinney opened his weekly press conference by recognizing members of Clemson’s operations, equipment and video staffs who have been responsible for moving the program across the country on an abbreviated schedule.
Clemson’s equipment truck left Monday night, Swinney said, with its drivers facing roughly 40 hours on the road.
“There’s just a lot of logistics that you just don’t think about for a trip like this,” Swinney said.
The timing has been complicated further by what happened Saturday.
Clemson expected to finish its noon home game with North Carolina with plenty of Saturday remaining. Instead, a lengthy weather delay stretched the day and squeezed an already compressed turnaround.
“You think you’re going to have a little bit of time,” Swinney said. “From a coaching standpoint, we knew we had a short week, so we thought we were going to be done and then we would have some time Saturday night. It just added to the strain of Sunday, of what we had to do.”
Clemson essentially had to combine Sunday and Monday into one day. Players who would ordinarily have Sunday off instead returned for treatment, meetings and practice. By Monday, Clemson was operating as though it were Tuesday.
“So it’s unique, but a good challenge,” Swinney added.
For Swinney, though, all the logistical planning ultimately leads back to something much more familiar: winning an ACC road game.
“If you win all your games at home, you can have a good year,” Swinney said. “But if you want to have a great year, you’ve got to find a way to win some on the road.”
Clemson has spent a year figuring out how to get to this one.
Now it has to win it.
