Titans Travel Plans: Mike Vrabel Might Be Making a Mistake Not Heading to London Soon
The Tennessee Titans will travel across the pond for a Week 6 game in London, England against the Baltimore Ravens. Titans head coach Mike Vrabel has said the team will travel after Thursday's practice, arriving on Friday. The same approach they had in 2018 when the team last played in England, losing to the Los Angeles Chargers.
Mike Vrabel talked about this decision at his press conference on Monday and why he decided not to go over early again this time.
"Our experience I think the last time that we went over," Vrabel explained, "is get a lot of work in here, have everything we need at the facility. Work ahead, make Tuesday a Wednesday, Wednesday a Thursday, Friday, so on and so forth. Get over there, get adjusted. Have a Friday practice, clean up a lot of the stuff that we did and then have our normal preparation for the game. I've talked to a lot of people who have done it both ways and that's how we did it last time. Felt like we were ready to go and just didn't end the way that we wanted it to."
Vrabel makes solid points about there being no definitive answer on whether going over early or not matters. Something echoed by Ravens coach John Harbaugh whose team also lost their last trip to London, but even so, Harbaugh is looking to try a different approach.
Harbaugh will be taking his squad to England much earlier than the Titans. The Ravens arrived on Monday and will spend the week practicing in the time zone they will play in on Sunday. Harbaugh spoke about that courtesy of BaltimoreRavens.com.
"It's mostly driven by the fact we didn't do well (in 2017). We did the opposite. There's no data. We looked for it – when you should go out there, what's the science on that. As often is the case, they really don't know. Hopefully in a week we get in pretty good shape. You're playing basically at 9:30 in the morning. We have practiced in the morning before. Hopefully by the time the game comes around, you've slept there six nights. I'd like to think you'd be pretty well ready to go. I think that was a big part of the decision to try and do it this way. Other teams go in and say 'OK, we're not going to mess with it. We'll just stay our own on clock, play at 9:30, get in and out.' It's just two schools of thought."
Harbaugh wasn't alone in this thought either. Buffalo Bills head man Sean McDermott spoke about his team's travel plans with regret after the Bills' lackluster showing in a loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars.
"We’ll see if, whatever comes up down the road in terms of us coming back here, but we need to evaluate everything because I didn’t feel like our energy was good enough early in the game. They had better energy than we did."
The winning team in that game, the Jacksonville Jaguars, seemed aided by their lengthy time in England. Jaguars head coach Doug Pederson credited his team's travel plans for Jacksonville's readiness to play.
Vrabel is currently 0-1 in England and if the Titans return 0-2, dropping to 2-4 on the season, there will certainly be questions about Vrabel's approach to these overseas games going forward and maybe bigger questions about the future of this team.
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