Bears face tough weather conditions in opener in Tennessee
By Dave Newhouse, STAFF WRITER
BERKELEY — The forecast in Nashville today is 90 degrees. It could be that hot or hotter 165 miles east in Knoxville over Labor Day weekend when Cal plays Tennessee in the season opener for both schools. And the temperature won't account for the humidity factor. Because it's the Deep South, it could be steaming and sticky that Saturday. Are you ready for some football, y'all? Coach Jeff Tedford is preparing his Cal team for that Dixie experience, but the Bears won't leave for Knoxville until the day before the Saturday, Sept. 2, game. With a full house at 104,047-seat Neyland Stadium, which often crams in 107,000, and with all that humanity compressing the heat on the field down below, shouldn't Cal arrive earlier to acclimate itself to the tropical conditions? "You're not going to get used to it," Tedford pointed out. "It's not something you can get used to. We're going to stay on our body clock as close as possible. If you go there in a day early (on Thursday), you get all discombobulated with your body clock.
"We'll go to bed at 2 o'clock in the morning their time, 11 o' clock our time. Our wake-up will be 10:30 their time, 7:30 our time. Everything we do, including practice in the afternoon, is going to stay on our body rhythm. "Thankfully, we're having some heat now. We're going to try and create humidity by wetting the field down." Maybe the Bears should also sneak off to some rural steam bath like Turlock, where Tom Holmoe once held Cal's fall camp to no avail. Sportswriter/talk show host Bob Gilbert covers Tennessee for the Murfreesboro Daily News-Journal, 15 miles from Knoxville. He makes football weather a study habit. "The mean weather here in mid-September is 75 degrees, believe it or not," he said Saturday. "Ordinarily, the
humidity is high in late August and early September. There's not a lot of air in the stadium."
Gilbert noted that Tennessee tries to play its home openers at night, as was the case with UNLV in 2004 and Fresno State in 2003. But ESPN scheduled the Cal-Tennessee game for 5:30 p.m. EDT (2:30 p.m. PDT). "I heard from someone that teams traveling west to east are affected more adversely than teams traveling east to west when it comes to acclimating to jet lag and humidity," Gilbert said. "I can tell you after making five trips to Hawaii that it's true." Cal trainer Ryan Cobb has a standard game plan for his players, whether it's the frozen tundra or beach weather.
"We prepare for every game essentially the same way in terms of our fluids," he said. "We force a lot of fluids into them. We put the water, Gatorade and hydration fluids in front of them at all times. "I wouldn't say we do anything any different (on Sept. 2). Luckily, we've had some weather here that's been a little bit warmer, so we've taken advantage of that." That's true except for the fact that there isn't a humidity problem in Berkeley, a hosed-down football field notwithstanding. The best way to fight the heat and humidity in Knoxville is with humanity. Cal may have its deepest team ever, so Tedford could rotate players to keep them from wilting. "Good depth and great conditioning," he said. "Depth actually helps keeping people fresh."
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