Ohio State alters travel plans

Ohio State's Big Ten opener at Washington on Saturday is the Buckeyes' first road game of the season, and the first of three in the next four games, so travel was a leading topic of discussion at Ryan Day's weekly press conference Tuesday."It's going to be a challenging environment," said Day about Washington's 76,000-seat Husky Stadium. "When you go on the road everything is a little bit more difficult. It's not anything new, but at the same time amidst the noise and chaos we have to have poise and composure. We can't let the environment dictate how we play." No. 1 Ohio State and Washington — both 3-0 — kick off at 3:30 p.m..The biggest change in Ohio State's routine will be flying to Seattle on Thursday instead of usually departing Friday for road games, including last season's game at Oregon."We'll leave Thursday this week. We're going to keep everything else the same," Day said. "We think that's the best way to go. We spent a lot of time talking about it to figure out what gives us the best chance to play at our maximum level. The good news is a bunch of our guys went out to Dallas and LA in the playoffs."Losing 32-31 at Oregon the last time Ohio State played a regular season game on the West Coast did not drive this year's earlier departure, Day said."It really wasn't anything about the trip. I thought we were playing fast," Day said. "I don't think there was anything sports science that says us leaving the day before had any effect on the game. I think it's more about are you focused, are you locked in, are you sluggish. You look at all these metrics. Didn't see any of that. "That being said, you always want to get better and we've done a lot of studying on this. We've talked to a lot of people in the NFL, we've talked to other sports about how they travel multiple time zones and we feel like this is the best way. We also looked at how we played in the playoffs as an indicator in this."