Raiders replicate home comfort in Florida

SARASOTA, Fla. — Barely a ripple disturbs the bay outside the Raiders’ hotel headquarters for this week. Kayakers and paddleboarders leisurely explore a marina sprinkled with brown pelicans, herons and egrets. The November air lacks the humidity that suffocates the summer. A calm and cool ride.

It’s smooth sailing inside the team hotel, too.

For the second consecutive year, the Raiders adapted to an arduous travel schedule by setting up temporary residence in Florida between two road games. A Ritz-Carlton resort houses the franchise’s meetings, meals, physical therapy and bedrooms. At the nearby IMG Academy in Bradenton, the club rents a locker room, fields and equipment to prepare for Sunday’s game against the Miami Dolphins.

Such amenities are designed to accommodate players and coaches, effectively simulating their resources back home in Alameda, California.

Creating a replica requires a major organizational effort.

It starts with security. Back home, about 2,400 miles away, the Raiders run a protected operation. Their practices are closed to the public. Their office building is guarded around the clock. A two-story complex serves as a football fortress whose most prized data is inaccessible to outsiders.

At the hotel, the team retains privacy.

Access to the west side of the floor level is prohibited to other guests. The team’s IT department installed private Internet servers, which can be used for players’ iPads on which the playbook and practice film is stored. As is standard where ever the team travels during the season, security roams the halls.

A team official approved Las Vegas Review-Journal’s usage of its hotel name. But such disclosure cannot come from the hotel, which treats the Raiders’ presence like an underground meeting from the movie, “Fight Club.”

“I can’t comment if we have them here,” said Evan Davis, Ritz-Carlton Sarasota director of sales and marketing. “It’s absolutely against policy. I can’t tell you who’s checked in. … Not a word. We don’t ever say who’s in the hotel and who’s not in the hotel.

”If (guests) want to set up signage and promote the fact that they’re here, that’s fantastic. They have the right to do so. We never have the right to do so. … Our official comment on hotel guests is we can’t comment on hotel guests.”

So there’s the perimeter.

Tom Jones, Raiders director of team operations, provided a brief tour beyond it for the purpose of this story.

A quick walk-through on Tuesday included a distant look of a large room checkered with tables. Players there can receive soft-tissue massage work. Each position coach is assigned his own private room. In the one where the defensive linemen meet, a whiteboard to diagram plays stands in the front-left corner. A projector screen is positioned front and center. Tables and chairs mostly fill the room’s remainder.

All in all, it’s what one would expect to find back home, save the two glitzy chandeliers hanging over tables that are covered in gold-colored cloth.

“Everything is (nearly) identical to Alameda for the players, and that’s really the point of it,” Jones said. “If we did this and it wasn’t similar to what we do, then it woudn’t be worth it. We don’t make any concessions.”

The Raiders loaded up and sent trucks from California to Florida for their stay. Players and coaches packed a Florida bag before traveling last Friday to New York for a game against the Buffalo Bills. That bag was shipped to Sarasota. Otherwise, the move was kept in the back burner while a separate group of team employees prepared the hotel for the football staff’s arrival.

There are certain upgrades from 2016. A cryotherapy chamber is now available to players. Hours for weight-room activities are more flexible to those who seek to operate on their own schedule, Jones said. But all in all, this year is a continuation of what the team considered to be a successful operation and investment from owner Mark Davis.

Coach Jack Del Rio and the Raiders submitted a formal request to the NFL in February that they play the Miami Dolphins following another East Coast game, thereby allowing them to stay in Florida. They filed the same request in 2016 for a road trip against the Jacksonville Jaguars and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The team won both games.

This year, Oakland had a choppy start to its trip with a 34-14 loss to the Bills.

The flow in Florida so far has been seamless.

Contact reporter Michael Gehlken at mgehlken@reviewjournal.com. Follow @GehlkenNFL on Twitter.