Losing a Monday recovery day or playing on a short week is also something NFL players are used to. However, it means Griffin and his staff have to get creative with adjusting routines. While Sunday night games can throw off the recovery clock for the week ahead, preparing for a Thursday night game on a short week is often the most tricky.
So, when the Falcons geared up to play “Thursday Night Football” earlier this season, the recovery began as soon as possible. After the Falcons beat the New Orleans Saints 26-24 in Week 4, the locker room became a recovery room. Griffin said about 95% of players stayed back long after speeches, showers and media availability had wrapped to start some sort of recovery. They brought in bikes, blood flow restriction units, vitamin packs and more to simulate a Monday recovery day.
The extra efforts paid dividends in Week 5 on Thursday night. The Falcons played a longer game than expected in a 36-30 overtime win against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Getting ahead of the recovery process was something Griffin learned when he was with the Los Angeles Rams. Griffin and Falcons head coach Raheem Morris both began their tenure with the Rams in 2021 — Morris as defensive coordinator, Griffin as assistant strength and conditioning coach and, eventually, associate director of strength and conditioning.
Both men took a lot from their time under Sean McVay. McVay would often consult with the player performance staff to coordinate whether the team needed to substitute a padded practice with a walk-through. The Falcons held a “walk-through Wednesday” in back-to-back weeks based on Griffin’s recommendation in Weeks 10 and 11.
The Falcons ruled out eight players in Week 11 against the Denver Broncos; it was one of their most injury-riddled games of the season.
“It’s really cool. Those guys have all the science behind it. We kind of just fall in line and say, ‘Okay, that’s what we’re doing today,'” Falcons offensive coordinator Zac Robinson said. “But seeing how that worked in L.A. and how fresh guys could be on Sundays dating back to my first year in 2019, I didn’t know that it was allowed to not practice on a Wednesday. I thought you just had to be smashing heads all the time.”
It’s all based on data the player performance staff compiles.
“The guys will have a chip in their shirt or their jersey. It just monitors yardage, how fast you run, how many yards you run, how many times you start, how many times you stop,” Griffin said. “Anything you want to know on a guy, there’s thousands of metrics you can look at.”
More importantly, it’s how you interpret the numbers. The data is all loaded into Microsoft Power BI — an interactive data visualization software — and Griffin has the challenge of figuring out what to do with it all. From there, they can get ahead of potential injuries. The numbers can determine if a particular player or position group is fatigued. Then they can make assessments to the coaching staff.
“It helps you make all the schedules, and it helps you be more confident in telling coach, ‘I think it’d be really good if we did a walk-through today,’ and you have some objective data to back it up,” Griffin said. “Rather than just subjectively looking at guys and saying like, ‘Hey, I feel like they’re banged up.'”