For players, preparation for an NFL game usually starts just a few hours after the previous week’s game has wrapped up. Coaches, on the other hand, might be thinking about games a week or two in advance. But no one in the organization has to plan further ahead than the operations unit.
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For most NFL teams, the operations unit handles a wide variety of tasks. One of the most important is managing travel and stay arrangements for the team on road games, hotels, travel, food, everything.
NFL teams carry 53 active players plus a dozen more on the practice squad. Add in a few injured players on IR, and you’re talking over 70 players. And that’s before counting the dozens of coaches and support staff. Overall, they’re managing travel arrangements for 150-200 people.
Because of this, the operations have to start planning right from the release of the NFL schedule in mid-May. As Atlanta Falcons senior director of operations Brandon Ruth explained during a story on NBC’s Today, it’s a months-long process getting everything sorted.
“The planning starts as soon as the schedule is released in May… It’s [with] starting to call hotels, seeing who’s available. Seeing the set-up, the flow,” he revealed.
Once Ruth chooses a hotel for the team, the process gets even more complicated. He has a 30-page document that he sends to the director of events at the chosen hotel, outlining the team’s entire itinerary and plan for the weekend.
There is also an “advance team” that heads to the hotel before the team arrives to ensure everything is up to snuff. As the Falcons did this past weekend in Minnesota, they often take over the hotel’s ballroom to house their mess hall as well as their offensive and defensive rooms. Even small details, like a coach’s preference for a table’s alignment, are taken into account.
However, arguably the most complicated bit of organizing concerns the hotel rooms for each of the 200 players, staff, and support people on the trip. As Ruth revealed, some guys have some very specific and seemingly innocuous requests that make their lives a little more difficult. But of course, Ruth and his team aren’t complaining.
“I’ve had players that don’t like elevators, so they like to take the stairs. Some guys like to have the corner room, some guys didn’t like odd numbers.”
It’s like playing Tetris, Ruth says.
Once everyone arrives, the hotel staff is expected to be able to get the 200 people into their rooms in 15 minutes or less. According to the NBC report, that is the “unofficial” NFL standard these days.
This time around, the team at the Marriott in Minneapolis got the Falcons settled in just 13 minutes flat. No small feat, but it shows just how much planning and preparation, a process that takes months, goes into making game weekend run this smoothly.
