Hard-working Utes' choice: Chuck-A-Rama

Chalking up wins for the entire season just puts that much more pressure on you to defeat the team from down the road.

It's almost like you train all season, not just for a conference championship, but to stick it to the guys who beat you last time.

When you take to the field against your rival, everything counts: your practice, your mentality, your game face. And it helps that you eat well, too.

Because if your body isn't a well-oiled machine, your team can't be, either.

A football player can burn up to 1,500 calories in a game, sometimes more in practice. And for two teams of about 100 players each, that's 300,000 calories, which after some fancy math, equals 348 kilowatt-hours.

That's enough power to run a couple washing machines for all of those uniforms for a year.

It's some serious green energy, but it has to come from somewhere.

And it goes back to that adage: "You are what you eat."

If that's true, then the University of Utah football team is a little turkey chow mein, ham-fried rice and broccoli beef with a few desserts stacked on top.

The choice is theirs, after all.

Tuesday is the hardest practice day of the week for the Utes.

Cornerback Brice McCain calls it "Bloody Tuesday."

And when the team came off the practice field this week, they headed out to Chuck-A-Rama just below the university's campus for a nice large refueling meal.

Because Tuesday is Asian night at the Salt Lake City-based buffet restaurant.

For the 81 scholarship football players, the football staff has arranged a contract with Chuck-A-Rama to have dinner there each Tuesday night. The players pay the same meal rate as everyone else who eats there, and it gives the players some time for off-campus camaraderie, says football operations director Mark Andersen.

"There's not a lot of social time," Andersen says, because the football program schedules the players' lives from morning until night for the entire school year.

But for the past two years, the U.'s program has contracted with the restaurant so the players can see a change of scenery and get a lot to eat all in one place.

Players at BYU have a different arrangement and are more likely to be found dining on campus for all meals, said BYU assistant athletic director Duff Tittle.

But the night before a game, the team stays at a full-service hotel, which has all the amenities a football team needs: food, meeting space and all the players in one spot.

It's what most teams do, Tittle says.