The Raiders and Patriots will be playing in Mexico City this Sunday and the two teams have opted for different ways of preparing for the game.
The Raiders are practicing in Oakland and are treating the game similarly to other road trips while the Patriots have moved operations to Colorado Springs after playing in Denver last Sunday. That allows them to stay at a high altitude before the trip to Mexico, something that Raiders coach Jack Del Rio chose not to do after playing in Mexico City last season.
During a Wednesday conference call with New England media, Del Rio said that the team looked at all options and that staying at home “made the most sense for us.” He was also asked if he thought people made too much out of playing at a high elevation.
“No, I think it’s real,” Del Rio said in comments distributed by the Patriots. “There certainly are challenges with travel in general. Certainly when you travel to a place where altitude is involved, that is an added challenge. We’re both facing that challenge. It’ll be interesting really to look back and take some after-action review from the two experiences that we’ve had, not that we’re going to share with each other because we have two contrasting approaches. We’re going in as late as possible and they’re spending the week training at altitude in Colorado. So, two contrasting approaches to it and we’ll see how it works out. We did this last year. We went the day before like we’re doing this year and that seemed to work for us. I know that there are several theories out there in terms of how you best handle the altitude and we just do the best we can to prepare our squads and then we go compete.”
Belichick said on his own conference call with Oakland reporters that he didn’t think the team’s decision to stay in Colorado was “that big of a deal” and that this worked best for the team after being in Denver.