Vanzack, if you simply asked for proof without attacking me I would have provided it for you without all this mess. There was a very famous study at Stanford done discussing circadian rhythms in sports.
"The scheduling of Monday Night Football games presents a unique
circadian problem, especially if a team from the West Coast is playing a
team from the East Coast. Players on the West Coast team are playing at
their equivalent of 5:30 p.m., no matter if the game is in Seattle or
Miami. Players on the team from the East Coast, meanwhile, are three
hours ahead in their own circadian cycles. In nature, this sort of
mismatch couldn't happen. It was only in the last 60 years or so that
we've developed a way to travel so quickly across time zones that our
internal clocks are no longer in sync with the daylight around us.
Fitting its cause, we call this condition jet lag.
Without
knowing it, athletes on teams from the East Coast are playing at a
disadvantage. Because of the circadian rhythm, which they can't control,
their bodies are past their natural performance peaks before the first
quarter ends. By the fourth quarter, the team from the East Coast will
be competing close to its equivalent of midnight. Their bodies will be
subtly preparing for sleep by taking steps such as lowering the body
temperature, slowing the reaction time, and increasing the amount of
melatonin in their bloodstream. Athletes on the team from the West
Coast, meanwhile, are still competing in the prime time of their
circadian cycle.
Every human body, ranging from a professional
athlete to a suburban dad, will experience small declines in physical
ability and mental agility the longer it fights against the circadian
rhythm. In the modern NFL, this has a significant impact because teams
in the league are more evenly matched than those in the other major
sports, and anything that alters a single player's ability has an
outsized effect on the outcome of the game. What's more, there is little
that an East Coast team can do about the circadian disadvantage. The
schedule gives coaches few chances to adapt to the time difference.
Teams traveling on the road typically fly in the night before the game,
and East Coast teams playing at home rarely attempt to put their body
clocks on Pacific Standard Time. Coaches instead tell their players not
to try to adjust to the time differences, preferring that they keep up
with their normal sleep patterns for consistency.
The Stanford
researchers dug through 25 years of Monday night NFL games and flagged
every time a West Coast team played an East Coast team. Then, in an
inspired move, they compared the final scores for each game with the
point spread developed by bookmakers in Vegas. The results were
stunning. The West Coast teams dominated their East Coast opponents no
matter where they played. A West Coast team won 63 percent of the time,
by an average of two touchdowns. The games were much closer when an East
Coast team won, with an average margin of victory of only nine points.
By picking the West Coast team every time, someone would have beaten the
point spread 70 percent of the time. For gamblers in Las Vegas, the
matchup was as good as found money.
In a test to ensure that
their findings weren't the result of West Coast teams simply being
better during those years, the researchers expanded their scope and
looked at every Monday Night Football game played during that
twenty-five-year time span. They found that the overall winning
percentages for West Coast and East Coast teams were essentially even
when the teams were not playing a game against an opponent from the
other coast. Nor were the results a reflection of home-field advantage.
When an East Coast team traveled to another destination within its same
time zone, it won 45 percent of the time. But if a team from the East
Coast played somewhere in the Pacific time zone, its winning percentage
shrunk to only 29 percent.
The circadian advantage—or
disadvantage, depending on your perspective–-popped up in studies of
figure skaters, rowers, golfers, baseball players, swimmers, and divers.
Everywhere you turned, there was evidence of the body's hidden rhythms
at work. One study found that in sports as varied as running,
weightlifting, and swimming, athletes competing when their bodies
experienced the second boost of circadian energy were more likely to
break a world record. Long jumpers, for instance, launched themselves
nearly 4 percent farther when the body was at its circadian peak. But
the circadian rhythm cut both ways. Athletes competing when their
circadian rhythm corresponded to the so-called sleep gates—those times
in the early afternoon or late nights when it's easy for most people to
fall asleep—consistently performed a little worse than normal, even if
the slowdown wasn't obvious to them.
https://deadspin.com/5934440/the-circadian-advantage-how-sleep-patterns-benefit-certain-nfl-teams
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