In addition to the usual pieces of furniture one might expect to find in an office—like say, a couch or a sitting desk—New England Patriots coach Matt Patricia also furnishes his workspace with a fully functioning bed.
The Pats’ defensive coordinator and future Detroit Lions head coach discussed his sleeping preferences during Super Bowl Opening Night this past Monday.
According to Patricia, once he joined the Patriots in 2004, he was quickly putting in 20-hour days and couldn’t find time for shut eye.
“I love to sleep,” he told reporters gathered at the Xcel Energy center, “but it just wasn’t really an option.”
Back when he first started, his strategy was simple: he’d plug away til dawn cutting game footage and coordinating defense strategy, then crash on a couch in his office. After a few years of this, his wife decided enough was enough and surprised him with a mattress for his workplace.
“My wife actually bought me a mattress cause I was sleeping on the floor at one point,” he joked. “That was about 10 years ago… I’m good now, I’ve got a nice little Tempurpedic roll-out mattress [in the office].”
While he may be the only coach to keep a bed under his desk, he’s far from the only football aficionado to take their sleep seriously. In fact, “sleep hygieneis an increasingly popular subject in the football community and refers to the overall health of a player’s sleeping habits. Just this week, the National Football League announced a new partnership with Sleep Number that’ll equip all active NFL players with Sleep Number 360 smart beds and special training geared toward amping up their Zzz’s.
In Super Bowl LII, two of the league’s biggest proponents for better sleep will face off against one another: New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins.
Brady is well-known for his particular sleep preferences, which center on an 8:30 pm bedtime every night.
“I do go to bed very early because I’m up very early,” he explained in the past. “The decisions that I make always center around performance enhancement… I love [football] and I want to do it for a long time. But I also know that if I want to do it for a long time, I have to do things differently than the way guys have always done it.”
For his part, Jenkins has long been fascinated by sleep’s role in health and recovery and regularly shares his enthusiasm for the subject at football youth camps.
“You’ve always heard you need eight hours of sleep, but you don’t know the science behind it all,” he told >Bleacher Report. “You don’t know until you’re taught the effect lack of sleep has upon your brain and its functionality. It changes completely when you’re sleep-deprived.”
So regardless of who you’ll be rooting for this Sunday, rest easy knowing your favorite players probably clocked in a fully optimized eight hours of sleep on their favorite mattress before heading onto the field.