NFL head coaches have different ways to deal with the stress of an impending game, and many coaches have a specific routine in the final 48 hours before kickoff. Green Bay Packers head coach Mike McCarthy has taken to eating dinner inside his hotel room on the road after the Packers kept losing whenever he’d go out to eat.

“I’m 0-for-3 the last three times I’ve done it, so I’m never doing it again,” McCarthy told me recently. “The one really bothers me, because it was that damn Kansas City game – 15-1.”

The meal would’ve been on Dec. 17, 2011, the night before the Packers’ 19-14 loss ruined their perfect regular season in Week 15.

McCarthy surely knows his meal choice wasn’t the main problem that day. (Crumbling on defense in the fourth quarter hurt worse.) But just about every coach has a routine, and McCarthy doesn’t like to disturb his.

As the story lays out, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes in the run-up to kickoff. And McCarthy isn’t alone in preferring to stay in the night before a game.

Miami Dolphins coach Joe Philbin, who spent six years under McCarthy as an assistant in Green Bay, told me he’s been out to dinner on the road maybe three times since he entered the NFL as the Packers’ assistant offensive line coach in 2003.

“I just stay in the hotel and I don’t want to go out,” Philbin said. “When you’re an assistant coach in the NFL, you’re consumed. A head coaching job is more consuming – maybe not the nuts and bolts of every single play, but the whole thing.”

The good news: NFL teams employ a lot of large, hungry men, so they usually make sure there’s food everywhere at the team hotel.