Does Body Clock Hold Key for Raiders? : Pro football: Former team doctor advises measures to help them adjust to travel to the East.

As the Raider team doctor, Robert Huizenga couldn’t help but notice that players had trouble adjusting to East Coast trips. One clue was watching players’ heads fall into their plates during pregame meals. Another was finding them asleep in the locker room before games.

So he started studying the effects of team performance and time-zone travel, and he saw the pattern.

“It turned out that jet lag can affect NFL performance,” said Huizenga, who was the team doctor from 1983 through 1990. “West Coast teams are affected more when they play East Coast morning games, and East Coast teams have a disadvantage when they come West for Monday night games. Then, (East Coast teams) are playing football at midnight (on their body clocks), and our bodies aren’t made for that.”

Huizenga says that peak performance time is early to late afternoon, which he believes could help explain the Raiders’ playoff disaster after the 1990 season, when they lost to the Bills in Buffalo in a 1 p.m. EST game, 51-3. Today, the Raiders will play again in Buffalo at 12:30 EST, which is 9:30 a.m. on their body clocks.

“Your brain clock is tightly hooked to the light-dark cycle,” Huizenga said, explaining why the west-to-east syndrome differs from east-to-west. “When you go across multiple time zones, your 24-hour clock gets out of sync with the light-dark schedule, the sun’s 24-hour cycle. It becomes confused. You get headaches, fatigue, sleep deprivation, detrimental performance in your heart-lung function. Your balance is slightly altered.

“Players need to have their pregame meal four hours before the game, which is 5:30 a.m.--which means they need to wake up at 4:30 on their body clock. All of us know that is not easy for someone who is used to waking up at 8 or 9 o’clock.”

Raider Coach Art Shell changed the Raiders’ practice time this week in Los Angeles, moving it up from 2 p.m. to 9:30 a.m. so the players’ body clocks would start adjusting. That’s the first step that Huizenga advises.

“A team should also leave two to three days before the game to get to the East city, and leave at such a time that they would arrive early in the day,” he said.

“Then the players should go to sleep two, three hours earlier than usual and maybe take a sleeping pill the first night so they can sleep. Then they will wake up in the early morning on Buffalo time and their system can start to shift so that when they play at 1 in the afternoon, their body thinks it is the afternoon and not the morning.”

The Raiders left Los Angeles at 3:30 p.m. Thursday and arrived about 11:30 in Buffalo. Shell scheduled practice for 12:30 EST Friday to keep the players on the same time clock.

Huizenga spent three years analyzing 10 years of won-lost records from 27 NFL teams to determine the jet lag effect on a club’s performance. His study, co-authored with researcher Rick Jehue and statistician Dennis Street, examined teams from 1978 to 1987 and has been published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise magazine.

Huizenga’s analysis of NFL teams also included findings on home-field advantage and Monday night games. He found that home teams won 56.6% of the time, and West Coast teams, whether home or away, have a distinct advantage over Eastern and Central time teams in Monday night games.

“One team that made some changes when playing East Coast games was the San Diego Chargers (during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s),” Huizenga said. “They would have early-morning practices and fly out early. There were too few games to make a statistical study, but it looked like it helped them.”