SOUTH BEND — How Notre Dame football adjusts to playing at altitude this weekend at BYU will go a long way toward determining whether the second-ranked Irish emerge with the nation’s second-longest active winning streak intact.
LaVelle Edwards Stadium in Provo, Utah sits 4,649 feet above sea level. That’s not quite the 5,280 feet that makes Denver the Mile High City and the NFL’s Broncos so stout at home, but it’s only off by 12%.
That’s why coach Marcus Freeman, director of football performance Loren Landow, sports performance director John Wagle and sports nutrition director Alexa Appelman started huddling over the summer to put together a plan for minimizing the altitude’s impact on the visiting team this week.
“Coach Landow was there in Denver for a long time,” senior linebacker and team captain Drayk Bowen said after practice on Tuesday Oct. 13. “He said teams that don’t really work on their breath or don’t — we call it ‘reload’ — that’s when they struggle. If you do your process, do your breathing technique, he said it’s not that much different.”
Landow’s experience working with Olympic athletes and his former role as Broncos strength and conditioning coach from 2018-23 make him uniquely qualified to prep a college team making a rare foray into the Mountain Time Zone.
“Make sure you’re eating the right things; make sure you’re hydrating,” Bowen said of this week’s reminders. “(Landow) said if you don’t do those things, that’s where it will affect you. But we have a great nutrition staff. Coach Landow has been working with us. Coaches are honest about it.”
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Drawing upon 2023 Sun Bowl experience
Bowen is among Irish seniors who finished off their freshman year with a trip to El Paso, Texas for the Sun Bowl against Oregon State. Playing at 3,763 feet above sea level, the Irish wasted little time blasting Oregon State 40-8.
Fellow senior Jordan Faison, in his coming-out party as an Irish wideout, took home MVP honors after that bowl win.
“The biggest thing is reemphasizing the things we already educate them on,” Freeman said on Monday Oct. 12. “How you hydrate and how you fuel your body is even more crucial earlier. We'll have oxygen if the guys need oxygen.
“But we coach and install reloading after a play in fall camp in the summer. There's a process to recovering, and they're going to have to double down on that.”
“Posture. Breath. Focus.” Those are among the key buzzwords for this week of game preparation.
“They're going to have to make sure they really focus on recovery after each play and how you take these deep breaths and how you settle down and calm down your breathing,” Freeman said. “If there was a way to raise the altitude in the indoor building, we would go do it. If there was a mask we would wear, we would do it.
“But it's really just driving home and reemphasizing the things we do. No matter what environment we play in, we have to educate our guys.”
A trip to Arkansas, where Frank Broyles Field sits 1,325 feet above sea level, resulted in a 56-13 rout in a game that started at 11 a.m. Central Time. The 2025 season opener at Miami and the 2024 opener at Texas A&M were jersey-soaking night kicks played in extreme humidity.
Notre Dame split those contests, but the exhausted Irish went on to lose Game 2 of each season at home: the Northern Illinois stunner in 2024 and a one-point heartbreaker to the Aggies after a bye week last year.
This trip to BYU promises an equally tricky riddle, one to be followed by the only bye week of the regular season for Notre Dame. It was not for nothing that Freeman mentioned in his opening remarks on Monday that BYU has nine come-from-behind victories in the second half since the start of 2024.
“We’ll see when we get there,” Bowen said. “From what they’ve told us of what we need to work on, it shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.”
Mike Berardino covers Notre Dame football for the South Bend Tribune and NDInsider.com. Follow him on social media @MikeBerardino.
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Notre Dame football stays hydrated, prepares to play BYU at altitude