Caldwell Says Lions Preparing For Home Or Road Atmosphere At Wembley Stadium
By Ashley Dunkak
@AshleyDunkak
CBS DETROIT - In some ways, an NFL game in London can be approached the way a college team approaches a bowl game, Detroit Lions head coach Jim Caldwell told Karsch and Anderson of 97.1 The Ticket.
A team does not know beforehand which team will have more fans, which team the neutral fans will embrace, or whether the atmosphere will overall be more like a home game or more like a road game.
"We've got to prepare for both ends of it," Caldwell said. "We've got to prepare for constant noise, like there is often times in soccer games, where there's a lot of noise-making and things of that nature. It's a larger crowd than what they've been accustomed to other than guys that have played in college football where they have fairly large stadiums. There's going to be somewhere between [80,000 and 90,000] people here at this game ... The noise level, it could be one that the defense has to deal with or the offense or both."
Playing overseas presents a variety of challenges for the Lions, who departed from Detroit on Monday night and arrived in London on Tuesday morning.
"The unusual part of it is obviously when you literally uproot your entire operation and move it overseas and then try to duplicate what you do at home, it's always a challenge, but I tell you what, it's been pretty nice," Caldwell said. "The big thing is that you have a five-hour time difference. That's huge because of the fact that you had to take into account how your team was going to be feeling physically. Fortunately we had some specialists do a lot of legwork for us and gave us the best sort of protocol in order to follow to make certain that we began to acclimate ourselves to this time zone as quickly as we possibly can.
"There's been some teams, previously, that have made the trip over here, came over like a Thursday and arrived on Friday morning and then ended up playing the game two days later, and they really never got themselves quite acclimated," Caldwell continued. "They showed signs of fatigue during the course of the game, extraordinary fatigue, and thus we decided to come out a few days earlier to give us a chance to get acclimated."
The Lions face the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday. Detroit has a record of 5-2, but its offense has been limited. Injuries have deprived quarterback Matthew Stafford of a number of targets, and the running game has struggled. With 82.4 rushing yards per game, the Lions rank 31st in the NFL. Caldwell emphasized that group has come through when most needed, however.
"Our running game has been timely," Caldwell said. "There's been a few games where we were able to absolutely close the game out because of the fact that we ran the ball effectively. At the end of the Jets game and a couple other games that was quite evident. We've just got to stay with it. Sometimes it just takes a little patience. The good thing about it is our defense has been playing well enough that we can be patient with the running game ... I think you'll continue to see it develop."
After seven games, Detroit's defense is still first in the league with 290.3 yards allowed per game.
