Does Iowa football have disadvantage as it travels two time zones? Here’s what a sleep expert says

IOWA CITY — Long before the days of an 18-team Big Ten and back when Kirk Ferentz was the football coach at Maine, he remembers a 1991 game at Rutgers where the team needed to drive “whatever that was, nine or 10 hours” to get to the game.

“Which we split up going down, but coming back it was a straight shot,” Ferentz said.

So Ferentz, now in his 26th season as Iowa’s head football coach, will not be one to complain about traveling on a charter jet on Thursday for the Hawkeyes’ Friday night game at UCLA.

“This is not exactly a big challenge that way,” Ferentz said 33 years after the 40-17 loss in Piscataway, N.J. “The weather will probably be a little better, too.”

As Iowa prepares for its trip to Pasadena, Calif. — with an expected high temperature of 75 degrees on Friday and 65 degrees by game time — it will be the Hawkeyes’ first regular-season game two-plus time zones away since its 2010 loss at Arizona.

Iowa’s unusual trip out west, which is about to become much more usual with the expanded Big Ten, could put increased value on the Hawkeyes’ sleep as they play in a night game where the time zone also is two hours later.

“All animal needs not only food, water, air, but sleep,” said M. Eric Dyken, a professor of neurology at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine. “And sleep, if you sum it up simplistically is a time for the body to repair.”

And time zones obviously have an impact on sleep.

“We all know about jet lag,” Dyken told The Gazette. “If you fly to Europe, the first three days are the worst. But it will take a young adult a full 24 hours for every one hour shift in their normal bedtime/awakening time to fully adapt to that new environment.”

Ferentz’s teams have played out west twice in the regular season, and both games were losses — a 44-7 loss to Arizona State in 2004 and a 34-27 loss to Arizona in 2010. Both losses were to teams that finished with worse records than the Hawkeyes.

Big Ten teams are 7-14 in conference games this season when traveling two-plus time zones. But that might also be a byproduct of the way scheduling worked out, as the road teams were favored in only eight of those 21 games.

Dyken sees some mitigating factors, too, that suggest the time change will not be too difficult for the Hawkeyes to overcome.

“Young men at this age generally are more evening-based,” Dyken said. “Their chronotype is an evening type where the term we use is phase-delayed, compared to old people like me, I’m more phase-advanced.”

That also is why Dyken believes Iowa may have an easier time adjusting to Pacific time than the west-coast teams have had adjusting to the Central or Eastern time zone.

“It’s easier to go west because of that evening chronotype,” Dyken said. “It’s easier to stay up later — because that’s what they’re going to do — than try to go to bed early.”

Should any Iowa football players (or coaches) struggle to adjust to the time zone, Dyken recommended a power nap “in the afternoon well before the game, not right before the game.”

“You don’t want to sleep over 30 minutes so you don’t get to the deeper stage, harder-to-wake-up-from stage of sleep,” Dyken said. “We want to get just that edge off the sleepiness so that we feel a little bit more refreshed.”

He suggested setting an alarm clock and also taking some caffeine before going to sleep. The caffeine “works on the basal forebrain to help keep you awake,” Dyken said, but it will “take about a half-hour to kick in.”

Some teams have left an extra day early for their west coast trips, including Penn State ahead of its game at USC. (That was the same week where Penn State’s James Franklin notoriously lamented the length of the State College Regional Airport’s runway.)

Dyken said that is “probably a smart thing to do.”

“It helps you start adjusting your biological clock in regard to the jet lag of that period of time,” Dyken said.

Iowa does not necessarily have that luxury as it departs on Thursday ahead of a Friday game, however.

The closest comparison in Iowa’s approach is to when the Hawkeyes played at Maryland in 2021 on a Friday night. Iowa fared quite well in that game, walking away with a 51-14 blowout win over a previously-undefeated Maryland team.

“It's different — now you're going West Coast versus East Coast — but we're probably handling it pretty much the same as we did that trip,” Ferentz said. “We didn't make a big deal of it.”

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com

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