☕️ S&C Daily — It's a Super Power

October 12, 2026

North Dakota State’s goal for every football player is 9 to 10 hours of sleep a night, and the Bison track it daily. Players log their sleep in XA Score, an app built by former college football coach Brad McCaslin, whose son Kelton is a senior defensive end, and coaches and training staff can see the results. Head strength and conditioning coach Ryan Napoli said 85% to 90% of players check in on a given day.

Napoli said the system has players thinking about sleep more, and he sees it in their output, especially in the weight room. McCaslin teaches athletes to start winding down around 8 p.m. and coaches the bedroom too: temperature, lighting and sound. “It’s a super power to be asleep by 10 p.m.,” he said.

Travel is the bigger test. After the move to the Mountain West, the Bison cover 13 time zones across six road games. After late charter returns, players nap on Sunday but keep it short enough to still be in bed by 10. For November’s trip to Hawaii, NDSU has a bye the week before and leaves on a Thursday, and McCaslin said the plan is to run on local time.

Ian Schieffelin went from All-ACC basketball player at Clemson to football player and back again. After earning All-ACC honors in 2025, he spent the fall on Dabo Swinney’s football team and appeared in eight games. When the season ended, he weighed 280 pounds and knew his future was in basketball. So he went back to his old coach, Brad Brownell, with one ask: “Hey man, I need to get in shape.”

Clemson strength coach Jon Uribe and nutritionist Michelle Sweeney helped him drop 40 pounds, and Brownell said he worked out at Littlejohn Coliseum every day for the last six months. That work earned him a shot with the Miami Heat. He played well on their Summer League team, signed an Exhibit 10 contract about two weeks ago and scored 11 points in his preseason debut.

A new study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research split 56 trail runners into three groups for a 26-kilometer race. Nineteen wore compression shorts during the race, 17 wore them after it and 20 wore none. Researchers measured jump height and timing and tracked creatine kinase, a blood marker of muscle stress, before the race, right after and two days later.

Both compression groups had smaller creatine kinase increases than the control group. Only the runners who wore the shorts during the race showed significant improvements in jumping power, right after the race and two days later. Exercise physiologist Julia Farid, who was not involved, told Outside the study “challenged the common assumption that compression garments should only really be used during recovery.”

The Eagles practiced all week at home, flew to London late Friday night and spent only about 36 to 40 hours on British soil before losing 19-17 to Jacksonville. As The Athletic laid out before the game, the Jaguars and last week’s London teams all arrived earlier in the week.

The reason was the week after. With no bye following the trip, the Eagles wanted to keep players’ body clocks from shifting so they wouldn’t have to readjust before facing Carolina. Kicker Jake Elliott called it a “two-week plan.”

Thunder center Aday Mara has 34 points on 15-of-15 shooting and 15 rebounds through two preseason games, after spending part of his summer in Spain working on his conditioning with new director of athletic performance Maral Javadifar. Coach Mark Daigneault called her “really talented.”

Oklahoma State sophomore center Mekhi Ragland spent seven weeks this summer at a Scottsdale weight loss retreat, with 4 a.m. hikes and seven to eight meals a day. He averaged 9.3 points on the team’s preseason trip to Puerto Rico, up from 1.4 as a freshman.

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