Are you the kind of person who gets to your gate five hours before your flight and checks that you still have your passport every few minutes just in case you forgot it at home? Well, you've got nothing on the New York Jets, who will be playing in London and consequently are spending a total of 65 hours across the pond. In order to avoid certain catastrophe, the team spent 11 months preparing for the trip — at one point even acquiring 350 rolls of toilet paper to bring along with them — because apparently the kind in England is too thin, The New York Times reports. (USA Today adds that this amounts to about five rolls per person for a single weekend.)
In all, the Jets are taking 5,000 different items on board with them when they travel — because what if they don't have cereal or gauze or extension cords in the U.K.? Additionally, every second of the trip has been meticulously rehearsed and prepared for, because herding football players is apparently akin to herding cats:
[Jets' senior manager of operations Aaron] Degerness learned which gate the plane would pull into, which door the team would exit and where the jet bridge would deposit the group. He also learned that when the Jets flew home, their walkway would meander past duty-free shops, and that worries him, if only a little."It's hard to tell the guys: 'Don't stop. Just keep walking,'" Degerness said. "Those are the things that keep us up at night — that we get through security, someone stops at duty free, and we leave Ryan Fitzpatrick because we didn't know he wasn't there." [The New York Times]
The next time you fly, just be thankful it isn't with the Jets. Read about the entire logistical nightmare over at The New York Times.
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