LAS VEGAS: It's perhaps the most talked about challenge for club football departments when the NRL gives them a ticket to Sin City: how do we do this and get home in one piece?
The Vegas strip is a dizzying cocktail of booze, gambling, showgirls and any number of booby traps for young men (and women) to fall into.
Big money is spent on security and months goes into detailed planning in an effort to keep players away from trouble but in a place like Vegas trouble tends to come knocking one way or another.
While there's yet to be a Vegas scandal big enough to put the venture in jeopardy, the hotel blue between Hudson Young and Morgan Smithies made it two in two years, following the post-match altercation between Spencer Leniu and several Broncos players last year.
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The two incidents were minor blips if you compare them to the biggest headline grabbers that have happened back in Australia but both serve as a reminder that nothing good happens after midnight, especially when you put four NRL teams worth of testosterone in an environment teeming with temptation.
So, it perhaps shouldn't have been a surprise to see Canterbury's chairman, CEO and football boss Phil Gould together on Thursday night at the NRL fan event in Fremont Street, collecting intel and starting to consider how to navigate the Bulldogs' Vegas trip when they get the call, which will almost certainly be next year.
It's understood that at this stage Gould favours the idea of a shorter pre-match stay in Vegas, arriving as late as Tuesday, with the Bulldogs toying with the idea of staying for several days after the game to let the players off the leash.
The way the NRL schedule is structured to accommodate the season launch in Vegas allows for that, given that all the teams that play at Allegiant Stadium get the following weekend off.
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Yet that hasn't been the plan that any other club has followed.
Of the four NRL teams who are here this year, the Raiders, Warriors and Panthers got to Vegas more than a week before their games, opening the door for players to get the party out of their systems before getting their minds on the job.
That blueprint was pioneered by Manly in 2024, one of the two winning teams and arguably the standout performer but the jury's still out on whether it's the right way to go.
Bucking the trend this year is Cronulla, with coach Craig Fitzgibbon picking the brain of his mentor, Roosters coach Trent Robinson, who opted to put his team in camp in southern California, away from the bright lights, before flying them into Vegas just a few days out from the game.
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While very different to Manly's approach, Robinson can also say he got it right based on the result, with the Roosters getting the better of a scrappy match to beat the Broncos 20-10.
The story of that trip was Leniu's racial slur directed at Broncos five-eighth Ezra Mam, igniting tensions between the two teams that spilled over at Resorts World in the aftermath.
Leniu copped a lengthy suspension and the Roosters took home a hangover that they didn't shake until after the Origin period, when they finally kicked into gear too late to truly threaten the premiership contenders.
The Broncos meanwhile, never really got going, with their loss in Vegas a harbinger of what was to come in a disastrous 2024 that ended with Kevin Walters' sacking.
On Sunday (Australian time) all eyes will be on the Raiders to see if they got it right by arriving in Vegas well in advance of their game and allowing their players to have a drink early in the preparation – a decision that led to Young, Smithies and an inflatable baseball bat tangling in their hotel lift.
One school of thought doing the rounds in Sin City is that the Raiders handled the situation superbly after the news broke, by providing the media with a detailed account of what happened and asking Young and Smithies to front the cameras and explain their actions to take the air out of the story.
The opposing view is that they got it wrong by rolling the dice and allowing their players to party on the strip and that despite their slick management of the crisis, they still go into their clash with the Warriors dealing with a significant distraction.
We likely won't get a verdict until full-time at Allegiant Stadium.
If the Raiders lose, you can be sure Gould and the Bulldogs brains trust will rubber stamp the blueprint that reads 'stay away from Vegas until there's no time to party'.