Marcus Freeman Tweaks Notre Dame's Thanksgiving Travel Schedule

Trips to the west coast and Thanksgiving weekend go hand in hand for Notre Dame football. The Fighting Irish have made their end of the regular season trips to Los Angeles to play archrival Southern Cal seemingly forever in even years, but they didn’t begin their regular trips to Northern California to play Stanford with regularity until 1999.

Whether it’s the Trojans in even years or the Cardinal in odd years, the Fighting Irish have customarily traveled west on Thanksgiving, but Irish head coach Marcus Freeman will flip that script this week.

"Usually we leave on Thursdays,” Freeman said this week. "We’re going to leave on Friday and the reason being, just from my feedback and dialogue is just best for their performance to just keep it as normal as we have in the past. So, we have a great group that’s going to have a great plan for the four-hour, four hour and 15-minute flight out there and what we’ll do on the plane.”

Traveling on Friday instead of Thursday means a full day on campus this Thursday/Thanksgiving Day.

"We’ll practice Thursday morning, and we’ll have a Thanksgiving meal as a team, which is just great because especially during the season this is our family,” Freeman explained. "We all look forward as a coaching staff and our whole football program, not (just) the coaching staff, to have Thanksgiving together We’ll give them the evening off and then we’ll get back on Friday and treat it like a normal Friday. We’ll have our normal walk-throughs, run-throughs here, meetings and then get on the plane and go.”

Friday is a typical travel day for road games for the Irish and switching the travel day keeps the schedule more standard. It’s still a long day with a four-plus hour flight and Freeman says the team will be fed seven times this Friday.

"We’ll feed them on the plane,” Freeman remarked. "We’ll try to let them take a nap and keep them up and then when we get out there we’ve got a plan for exactly when we land and then it’s a 4 o’clock game in our minds while we’re out there. So, that’s very similar to what we deal with here for our 3:30 game. So, we wanted to keep it as normal as possible even though it is a three-hour time difference that all these decisions that we make (are) to help performance. Nothing we do is just ‘because’. It’s like, we believe this will help performance on Saturday. So, I have a good confidence that our guys will be ready to roll.”

The last time Notre Dame didn't travel to either Southern Cal or Stanford to close the regular season was in 1997 when they finished at Hawaii.

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