If they want to beat Cowboys, Redskins won’t have any time to lose
By Mark Maske, Mike Jones and Liz Clarke November 20 at 7:14 PM
In the NFL, there is a time limit for celebrating a victory, savoring a good performance, lamenting a defeat or brooding over an on-field mistake. Some teams call it a midnight rule; to others, it is a 24-hour rule. After that, it’s time to move on because it’s a week-to-week league and another game looms.
This week for the Washington Redskins, it had better be something closer to a 24-minute rule. Or maybe a 24-second rule. The Redskins face a turnaround about as rapid as they come, leaving behind their Sunday night game against the Green Bay Packers at FedEx Field to get ready for a late-afternoon Thanksgiving Day meeting with the Dallas Cowboys in Arlington, Texas.
All NFL teams deal with the Sunday-to-Thursday preparation rush each season. But for the Redskins, things will be even more hurried and perhaps harried than usual this week, with the lateness of Sunday’s game and the earliness of Thursday’s game trimming a few hours off each end of the usual equation.
“It’s hard enough,” veteran defensive lineman Cullen Jenkins said last week. “But it’s Sunday night and Thursday afternoon. By the time you finish the game Sunday night, you get home, it’s Monday morning and turn around and fly out Wednesday to go to the game. It’s definitely a really quick turnaround . . . And the other thing is the flight. It’s a good little flight down there. So I got the little tights that I’ll wear to help keep the swelling down and limit stiffness. You’ve got to try everything.”
Another Redskins defensive lineman, Ricky Jean Francois, said: “It’s B.S. Why you gonna have a bunch of guys playing Sunday night and in a few days afterward you got a bunch of guys playing a Thursday afternoon in Dallas?… I would like for you guys to ask [NFL Commissioner] Roger Goodell this question. I don’t really believe the NFL believes in player-safety. All they’re trying to do is make another buck.”
Coach Jay Gruden kept the players’ schedule the same as usual last week, wanting to keep their minds on the game at hand. That obviously will change this week, and most teams facing the Sunday-to-Thursday turnaround minimize the intensity of on-field work and focus on recovery and mental preparation for players. The Redskins are scheduled to conduct only walk-throughs, no full practices.
“The schedule-makers did us no favors playing a night game on a Sunday and then having to leave Wednesday afternoon and play Thursday,” Gruden said last week. “That’s going to be a grind and we have to adjust our schedule . . . After the game Sunday night, we’ll talk about our schedule with the players. We’ll have to find a way to get the work in to get ready for Dallas.”
It is a cram session for coaches, and the Redskins began their preparations for this Cowboys game during the recent bye week.
“Our bye week we dedicated a few days obviously to ourselves, our self-scout, going back and evaluating ourselves,” defensive coordinator Joe Barry said. “We dedicated a day to the Vikings [the Redskins’ first post-bye opponent]. But we also dedicated a day — as a coaching staff, I’m talking about — to the Cowboys. So we got a little bit of legwork done over the bye week for these guys. But it’s hard. It’s a challenge that every single team has, every single week, playing on a short week on Thursday night.”
The coaches also planned to spend time on the Cowboys while they were at the team’s hotel Sunday, waiting for the late start to the Packers game.
“People don’t realize how big a difference it is between playing a 1 o’clock game on Sunday and playing an 8:30 game on Sunday,” Barry said. “So as coaches we are going to do a little bit of work at the hotel on Sunday . . . since we’re going to have quite a bit of time in the hotel on Sunday. But it’s hard. It’s a challenge. It’s part of the deal.”
It’s also part of the deal that all Thursday games are particularly difficult on the team that must fit traveling into its condensed workweek. Home teams are 8-3 in Thursday games this season, and six of the eight victories have come by eight points or more. There remains skepticism in and around the sport about the wisdom of the NFL playing a Thursday game each week throughout the season, although such an argument does not apply to the Thanksgiving games.
“I don’t really care what the league office has to say: The human body wasn’t meant to play football on three days rest, not at the level that we play,” Hall of Fame front office executive Bill Polian said recently. “The Thursday nights have been awful. Maybe not awful. The Thursday night games have not been compelling. But I realize why: One team is traveling. Both teams are beat to hell. So that comes with the territory. You can’t expect to have a game on three days rest. The malarkey that they have the long bye afterward, that’s just a talking point.”
The NFC East-leading Cowboys, winners of nine straight games, have an easier path to this game than the Redskins do. They played a 1 p.m. ET game at home Sunday, and play again at home Thursday.
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s good to play in that game against Dallas,” Jean Francois said. “That’s the game that everybody grew up on: Thursday, the Thanksgiving game, and we’re playing in Dallas. Who wouldn’t want to play in that game?… But you’re making two powerful teams play on short notice—especially us. We’re playing Sunday night…. At the end of the day, the NFL says they’re down for player safety. But they do a lot of things to show us what they’re really about is the green.”
Players, like coaches, must do their preparation early, Jenkins said.
“You have to do a lot of stuff ahead of time,” Jenkins said. “Make sure you get enough rest and sleep, eat right and take care of your body. Once you get to Sunday, on Sunday and Monday, you can’t be scrambling to get anything extra in. By then, it’s already too late . . . Eat healthier, avoid fried foods, alcohol. Try to limit that stuff as much as possible so your body heals fast.”