The Eagles have been planning their trip to Brazil for months, and assistant general manager Jon Ferrari has been leading the team’s organizing efforts since the game was first announced back in February.
Ferrari answered a bunch of questions Monday about the planning process and addressed the Eagles’ plans in some specific areas.
Here are some highlights from Ferrari’s chat:
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Did the Eagles really tell the players to stay in their rooms?
“No. So we had a team meeting the other day, we sort of talked, educated them about everything to do with the trip. We wanted to make sure, like any new place we go to, when we go to New England for a joint practice for four days, we educate them. We go to the Super Bowl, we educate them on the experience. So we sort of gave them just the layout of what that area was, but there's nothing set like prohibiting them from doing it.”
Can you make this a normal football week?
“We've been doing everything we can on the back end, so for the players and coaches, it's a normal football trip. It's a special, unique opportunity, but it's a normal football trip. … We want to, when we get off that plane and get through customs, we want it to be as normal and football focused and football forward as possible. Yes, it is a long flight. We have to do things medically and from a recovery standpoint to make sure we put everybody in the best position to play. It is outside of the length of the trip. We're going to play in L.A. and it's going to be five hours, right? This is double that or close to it. So you just want to make sure that that's as normal as possible.”
Philadelphia Eagles
Are you concerned about wildfires in the area?
“Been keeping close track of it, monitoring that, working with the league. The league has staff on the ground, so we're constantly monitoring that, going back and forth with them and making sure that it's safe to play. It hasn't been an issue yet.”
What will the field be like?
“Tony Leonard, our head of grounds, who's incredible, works for the league on different committees, he went and he's been working with the league liaison to the field, Nick Pappas is his name, and they've been working closely on the field for months. It’s a soccer pitch, obviously, but it's been retrofitted so it's in great shape.”
Why wait until Wednesday to travel?
“We worked with our doctors. We looked at this from a lot of different perspectives. … But because of the lack of time difference, this isn't like going to London or going to Germany, or any of the other … countries that they're looking at playing. We get there, it's going to be a one-hour difference. So we felt like the best thing to do was get there, get a good meal, get a good night's sleep, and then hit the ground running on Thursday."
How do you handle a 9½-hour flight?
“Normally, you have one meal. We've got two. We're going to try to stay awake and try to get a good night's sleep once we get there. Extra hydration, you know, hydrating before the flight, things like that. And then obviously trying to get some rest after the game and come back. That's more the bigger one, just making sure we get rest. But everything that we've done has definitely been tailored to making sure that they are comfortable (as possible), that their recovery, postgame especially, is put at the forefront.”
What’s different about the actual travel?
“We prepare customs for a large group coming in, like any charter plane, so we have a plan to get through customs efficiently, but we’ve got to go through customs. This is not like how we normally travel, where we have a TSA agent down at the airport. We are in terminals (and we’ve) got to abide by all the customs laws and rules.”
Why did the practice week start on Sunday instead of Monday?
“Well, there's a little bit of a difference because we normally have meetings here, then we travel the day before the game. Now we're traveling two days before. We have this extra day, we've sort of taken a day and made that a travel day. So we get our week of practice in, then we have a travel day, and then we have our day-before-the-game activity. So there's like an additional day in there. So that is a little bit unusual, a little bit different. … But in terms of the other stuff, once we get through the afternoon on Thursday, it's going to be a normal road game."
What sort of medical care will be available?
“The hospital near the stadium is brand new and is state of the art. So if there was an issue, the league has doctors that are working down there with the Brazilian medical authorities, we feel very confident in the quality of the league doctors, and obviously our medical staff would stay back (if a player couldn’t return home) like we do with any player who is unable to travel because of an injury. So we actually feel really good about it and feel really good about its proximity to the stadium, and the quality of the hospital. It's brand new, it's beautiful.”
Has the team been vaccinated for yellow fever, which is common in Brazil?
“The hotels there, the outdoor spaces, take those things into account with netting and things like that. But also, if you look at the country, a lot of the mosquito-borne things that you're referring to, it's not really in the urban areas as much, it's more out in the more rural areas. We've done a lot of work on the medical side of this, we're actually not as concerned about any of that, especially when you look at what our schedule is going to be like, how long we're going to be there, the normalcy of the football schedule. So we're not as concerned about it.”
What kind of food will be available for the players?
“(Performance nutrition coordinator) Steph Coppola (has been) making sure that the food at the hotel there is being prepared (correctly), is the quality of food that we want, and actually Brazil has incredible high-quality produce and meat, it's all organic, and they take great pride in that, it's a big source of pride, so we're looking forward to that, and then making sure that it's prepared the way we want it to, to make sure that all those nutritional things that she considers all the time are taken into account.”
How did they pick a hotel in São Paulo?
“(The NFL) picked (several) hotels based on meeting space, the size of rooms, availability, all those different things. They took those into account. So we were given a menu. And then when we went over there in April, we looked at a few different things and then we decided where we wanted to be in sort of proximity to the stadium, proximity of the airport. There were some that were further away, but they were bigger. We're about 30 to 40 minutes from the stadium and about 15 minutes from the airport.”
Why is the game at Arena Corinthians?
“It’s shaped a little bit like StubHub (in Carson, California) when the Chargers played there. It's got a really cool design, it's got a great sound to it, because like StubHub, the sound pushes back down, it gets loud, it's really an exciting venue. They picked a great stadium, and there's several stadiums in a big city, they picked a great venue. And I know that venue was smaller than some of the others, but they picked it because of its intimacy and because of the setting for the game.”
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