[Jamesy]

Interesting article, but this strategy only works because of the timing of the event.

Exploiting a scheduling quirk—Singapore’s 8 p.m. race typically follows a slate of afternoon starts in Europe— the entire paddock just lives in an alternate, nocturnal universe.

But if the game is at 12 EST/9am PST like the WF game, or from Georgia Tech's perspective, at 1030PM EST/730PST, you can't just keep your body on your local time. I don't really count the WF loss as a brobdingnagian loss, and I discount the GaTech win as well, because they just aren't fair competitions.

IMHO Stanford, or cal for that matter, will never be a contender while they are in the ACC. Even great Stanford teams struggled with early east coast games. You simply can't overcome the human body clock. Even the best teams going across multiple time zones and playing very early or very late will not perform at their best and will lose more than their talent and coaching would otherwise predict.

Stanford's optimal strategy is to play all their home games against east coast teams as late as possible, though the early games are probably still harder than the reverse- the numbers suggest the penalty for east coast teams going west and playing late is not as bad as the inverse. Maybe some sort of agreement could be made in the conference for all bicoastal games to start between noon and 4 PM (PST) but of course the TV overlords wouldn't allow that.

Why is it such a big deal at the college level, but at the NFL level, where a 10 AM PT start on the east coast is only an hour later than in college, no one gives it a second thought? NFL teams from the pacific time zone are actually over .500 when playing at 10 AM PT over the past 10 years. Teams aren't routinely going out more than 2 days prior, similar to the college level, and margins at the NFL are even smaller than in college.

[Jamesy]

Interesting article, but this strategy only works because of the timing of the event.

Exploiting a scheduling quirk—Singapore’s 8 p.m. race typically follows a slate of afternoon starts in Europe— the entire paddock just lives in an alternate, nocturnal universe.

But if the game is at 12 EST/9am PST like the WF game, or from Georgia Tech's perspective, at 1030PM EST/730PST, you can't just keep your body on your local time. I don't really count the WF loss as a brobdingnagian loss, and I discount the GaTech win as well, because they just aren't fair competitions.

IMHO Stanford, or cal for that matter, will never be a contender while they are in the ACC. Even great Stanford teams struggled with early east coast games. You simply can't overcome the human body clock. Even the best teams going across multiple time zones and playing very early or very late will not perform at their best and will lose more than their talent and coaching would otherwise predict.

Stanford's optimal strategy is to play all their home games against east coast teams as late as possible, though the early games are probably still harder than the reverse- the numbers suggest the penalty for east coast teams going west and playing late is not as bad as the inverse. Maybe some sort of agreement could be made in the conference for all bicoastal games to start between noon and 4 PM (PST) but of course the TV overlords wouldn't allow that.

Why is it such a big deal at the college level, but at the NFL level, where a 10 AM PT start on the east coast is only an hour later than in college, no one gives it a second thought? NFL teams from the pacific time zone are actually over .500 when playing at 10 AM PT over the past 10 years. Teams aren't routinely going out more than 2 days prior, similar to the college level, and margins at the NFL are even smaller than in college.