I have read a few articles on WSJ about this topic, notably at Nebraska two are below). I also remember one of the articles discussing how many volunteers were used to text reminders to athletes reminded, as to not to forget breakfast or lunch.
Chew on this, football fans: Dietitians are a key part of success at top programs
By ERIC OLSON
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) - Rex Burkhead arrived at Nebraska two years ago like a lot of other college students. He had weaknesses for ice cream and late-night hamburgers.
Nowadays, under the supervision of the Cornhuskers' sports nutrition staff, the junior running back can account for every calorie and carb that goes into his body. Those midnight burgers are out, and Burkhead said he's never felt, or played, better.
Can a winning diet lead to wins on the football field?
The Collegiate & Professional Sports Dietitians Association said 13 schools in the preseason Top 25 poll employ at least one full-time sports registered dietitian and five of those schools have two. The group said there are only 13 full-time sports RDs spread across the other 95 members of the Football Bowl Subdivision.
The CPSDA said schools serious about competing at the highest level need people to oversee what, when and how much their football players are eating.
"I take a lot of pride in feeling like our guys are going to be the best-fueled team out there," Nebraska director of sports nutrition Josh Hingst said. "When it comes to the third and fourth quarters, our guys aren't going to be dragging. We're going to fuel them to perform, and nutrition isn't an aspect where we're going to drop the ball."
Long gone are the days of the old-school training table, usually a partitioned dormitory dining hall where steak was served once a week and the athletes could go back for second helpings where it wasn't allowed for other students.
Nebraska will spend more than $1 million this year on specially prepared foods for its athletes, and that doesn't include more than $200,000 for supplements or Hingst's $74,000 salary.
Nebraska, however, is one of the few athletic departments that operate in the black. Cost-conscious athletic directors have been slow to commit resources to sports nutrition, CPSDA president Dave Ellis said. Typically, he said, an outside consultant or someone from a university's student health department will give a talk to athletes about healthy eating and then provide no follow-up.
Tom Osborne, Nebraska's Hall of Fame coach and now the athletic director, was among the first to buy in to the value of sports nutrition. Nebraska built a premier training table complex with the money it received for appearing in the 1983 Kickoff Classic, and the school hired Ellis as its first sports nutritionist in 1994.
"It's a student-welfare argument more than a keep-up-with-the-Joneses argument," Ellis said. "How can you assume these are part-time athletes? They may only practice a set number of hours in season and in offseason workouts. The damage done takes longer than 24-hour cycles. It's a very important thing to know we're in the recovery business, and these athletes are always in a state of damage and recovery that requires quality rest and quality intervention with diet."
Alabama's Amy Bragg said she and other sports RDs must break their charges' bad habits when they arrive on campus. Like many Americans, she said, most freshmen eat too much fast food and not enough fruits and vegetables.
Eating right -- and at the right time -- promotes faster muscle recovery and deters athletes from seeking shortcuts.
Bragg said sports RDs can also assess supplements and are on the lookout for the use of substances that are banned by the NCAA.
"Let's feed them right so they don't have to do the other things," Bragg said.
At Nebraska, each football player is analyzed at the start of his freshman year to determine, among other things, whether he needs to gain or lose weight and how many calories he requires to perform at his highest level. Each gets a laminated meal card that he can refer to when he goes to the training table and for snacking tips.
Burkhead adheres to a 4,500-calorie-a-day diet that allows him to maintain his 210 pounds and 6.5 percent body fat. Offensive linemen, on the other hand, might require 5,000 calories a day to stay at 300 pounds and have 20 percent to 25 percent body fat.
The average male requires about 2,000 calories a day to maintain his weight.
Ellis founded an easy-to-follow 1-2-3 plan for players to follow. Fruits and vegetables are "1," carbohydrates are "2," and lean proteins are "3."
At lunch and dinner Burkhead ladles up a predetermined number of servings of each. He visits an area in the football complex known as "the landing" throughout the day to snacks on fruits, trail mix and sports drink. He has a glass of milk at bedtime.
Players stop by the "fueling table" on their way in and out of practices to pick up approved supplements and other items that help them recover quickly from the wear and tear on their bodies.
Players are monitored through weekly weigh-ins, with Hingst tweaking their meal plans accordingly.
Hingst also offers cooking classes to players so they can prepare their own meals when the training table is closed, and nutrition staffers clip newspaper ads pointing players to the best grocery buys around Lincoln.
Burkhead said a football player can't help but eat right at Nebraska -- though he does admit to sneaking some ice cream from time to time.
"I thought I knew a lot about nutrition before I got here," he said, "but I didn't know nearly as much as I know now."
Hingst said the dietitian's role is as important as those of the strength coach and athletic trainer in college football.
"We're trying to look at every single area of nutrition and do the best job we can and make sure it isn't the limiting factor, the weak link in the chain," he said.
College Football's Last Frontier: Better Food Looking for an Edge, Top Programs Are Devoting Strategy, Resources to Player Nutrition; the Grilled-Cheese Game Plan.
This season, dozens of top college-football teams are making the same expensive bet on one aspect of football that old coaches from the leather-helmet days never gave much thought to: sushi rolls, crab legs and hand-blended smoothies.
As college programs struggle to maintain their dominance in the face of increasing parity, the issue of how much the players eat during the season—and what they're eating—has been elevated from a running joke to a serious matter that includes teams of chefs, dietitians and volunteers, and that's becoming part of the way some teams prepare for games.
At Washington, four full-time chefs cook meals for the school's athletes year-round, including the occasional feast of New York strip. Nebraska says it devotes around $1 million a year to feeding scholarship athletes—a process that starts with a breakfast spread at its training facility every morning at 5. As part of its beefed-up nutrition plan, Alabama says it instructs flight attendants on long trips to ply the players with Gatorade.
Before it takes on Stanford in November, Oregon says it will prepare for that team's punishing running attack by trying to bulk up its defensive linemen. On the menu: chicken-noodle soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches.
Florida, which started its program in 2003, may have taken the idea the furthest of all: It spends $58,000 each year just on pre- and post-practice snacks for the football team. Florida also provides five types of smoothies on demand and employs two full-time dietitians, a pair of interns and up to a dozen volunteers, with some staffers texting the players to remind them to eat lunch. To make sure they know what to buy, the school's diet specialists take players on guided informational tours of the grocery store.
"It's the last remaining edge," said Chelsea Zenner, one of Florida's nutritionists. "Every team at the top has a coach who deserves to be there and every team has great weight rooms and strength programs. The last edge is nutrition."
NCAA rules restrict players to just one athlete-exclusive meal a day while campus dining halls are open. In the interim, all they're allowed to do, besides provide fluids, is to offer fruit, nuts and bagels at any time.
Still, as with most things in college football, the system favors rich schools. The NCAA doesn't limit how much schools can spend on that one daily meal. They're also free to continue feeding them long after the season is over and when school isn't in session. And there are no limits on the number of tests players can undergo or how often they can consult with dietitians.
Even at odd times when dorms are closed, such as during preseason practices or the winter break before a bowl game, schools are allowed to give players a per diem to cover the costs of food. Not surprisingly, there's a gap between the haves and the have-nots: Major programs like Utah give $40 per day, while less-renowned ones like Florida Atlantic give only $25.
Miami (Fla.) coach Al Golden told an alumni group over the summer that one of his priorities was to make sure his players ate three good meals a day. He also complained about the school's per diem for athletes, which is around $16. Miami declined to comment.
Monica Van Winkle, the Washington Huskies' team nutritionist, says a 280-pound lineman who is trying to maintain his weight will typically consume around 5,200 calories in a day. A wide receiver would eat 4,100. At Florida, the typical meal for a big eater consists of a steak, perhaps chicken teriyaki, three to five crab cakes, sesame chicken, a carbohydrate option like pasta with marinara sauce and a plate of sushi.
Nebraska's nutritionist, Josh Hingst, says the school's food game plan is "no different" than the game plan for offense or defense. When the Cornhuskers traveled to Wyoming last week to play at an elevation of over 7,000 feet, the team prepared a food plan like they'd prepare for a spread offense.
To accommodate for the lower oxygen levels, Hingst designed an "anaerobic" diet. Players were handed significantly more fluids on the flight. Then, starting one hour before the game, they were given orange slices, bananas and meal replacement bars to combat the low oxygen. The Cornhuskers won, 38-14. Hingst, who used to work for the Atlanta Falcons, said Nebraska's training table is "a lot better."
In case you're wondering, most teams don't try to ban fast food entirely. Florida aims for 80% of its players' meals to be healthy. Oregon's nutritionist, James Harris, said he patrols players' Facebook accounts to make sure they aren't holding unhealthy food. He said a clear violation of healthy living, documented on social media, results in an immediate call or text—which he said happens "every day."
To encourage players to avoid undoing all the nutrition by chowing down on pizza and beer, Washington's Van Winkle encourages players to cook their own meals—she estimates ten players from last year's freshman class are doing so.
The big question, of course, is whether all this fussing over food pays dividends on the field.
Alabama considers the matter important enough to have Amy Bragg, a team nutritionist, on the sideline for most games. She said she's responsible for feeding players time-released foods at halftime to ensure players won't fade or cramp in the fourth quarter.
Dave Ellis, a former strength coach at Nebraska, said revered former coach Tom Osborne used to say that good eating helps a team perform 2% to 4% better—a huge margin at the top of college football.
"When you're playing top games, it's the team that can keep its starters in that will end up winning," said Ellis. "So food might distinguish the outcome of the game when it's late."
Write to Kevin Clark at kevin.clark@wsj.com
