MELBOURNE, Australia -- Although the Los Angeles Rams will pose as the home team for the season opener against the San Francisco 49ers, it’s the Niners who spent the week leading up to the game making themselves at home in Melbourne.
That’s because the teams elected to take completely opposite approaches to the longest road trip for a regular-season game in NFL history. The Niners opted to fly 16 hours and nearly 8,000 miles to Australia last Wednesday night, landing in Melbourne on Friday morning, a little more than a week before the 10:35 a.m. (AEST) kickoff this Thursday.
The Rams, meanwhile, plan to arrive the day before the game. Both teams will return to California immediately after the game.
Those disparate approaches have left both teams open to questions on the better approach to the long trips and how it might affect their performances in Week 1.
The NFL leaves travel plans for games both domestic and international up to the teams, with no mandate on arrival or departure.
“It’s at the team’s discretion,” Charlotte Offord, general manager of NFL Australia and New Zealand, said. “Everyone has their own method in terms of how they believe they should show up and what’s best for the team. Both teams coming in have completely different approaches and that’s fine.”
No matter the outcome, it’s safe to assume at least some of the postgame analysis will include the travel discrepancy. But will it really matter?
A pair of medical professionals -- Dr. Cheri Mah, a sleep physician and performance specialist, and Dr. Vonda Wright, an orthopedic sports surgeon -- offered a better understanding of the pros and cons of each approach.
The 49ers’ plan
Upon learning they’d be playing in Australia, the Niners sought information on the best way to execute.
“I would love to just show up the day before and just play, but I’m not the best when it comes to the science and everything on that stuff,” head coach Kyle Shanahan said. “You ask people who’ve done it a number of times, you ask people who study it, you take all their opinions in ... The recommendation for everybody has been to tell us when to go, and it’s made a lot of sense. And I know how our players feel also. I was a little bit on the fence. Science wasn’t and our players weren’t at all. That helped me get off the fence.”
The Niners flew to Australia late last Wednesday night and arrived early that Friday morning. They had some light walk-throughs and “shake-outs” to get their bodies loose over the weekend before having a normal practice week on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
The pros: According to Mah, who has worked with NFL teams on their sleep methods and spoke at the player health and safety summit in the spring about how to travel smarter, the Niners will at least be able to recover from travel fatigue and jet lag, even if body clocks aren’t fully calibrated.
“I think it’s helpful that they’ve given themselves a cushion to do that because regardless of the jet lag, there’s also travel fatigue [from] this 16-hour flight that they’re taking,” Mah said. “That’s a long time on a flight. And being able to recover from the travel fatigue is a separate issue than just how the body clock is adjusted and how that can affect your sleep and daytime functioning.
“What the Niners are doing I think definitely will be helpful to have those additional days in between.”
While the 49ers won’t practice at the same time as the scheduled kickoff, those sessions will be pretty close to that window.
“They will have had three or four days to shift their time a couple hours forward,” Wright said. “They will have slept; they will have eaten. Will they be totally acclimated? Nope. But they will have had two or three days to get [a] solid eight [to] 10 hours of sleep in.”
Both Wright and Mah noted that another benefit of early arrival is the chance to get and stay hydrated (the Niners gave each player a specific amount of water to consume on the plane ride based on their size and needs) as well as get sunlight at the proper times of the day.
The cons: Even with a week in the country, the Niners will not be able to fully reset their body clocks to Australia time due to passing through many time zones. According to Mah and Wright, it takes the body roughly one full day for every time zone crossed.
On a flight this long over the international date line, there’s not enough time for the 49ers to catch up. The Niners will then face the opposite effect in returning to California to begin preparation for Week 2 against the Miami Dolphins.
San Francisco will have a few extra days off upon returning to the West Coast, but it will still take careful planning to get back on Pacific time before returning to practice.
“Their reacclimating coming east may be more difficult,” Wright said. “Afterward, they may need to have a tight schedule of light and dark and on the way back feed the guys as they would be on the West Coast and taking short naps and just trying to reacclimate them.”
The Rams’ plan
Much like they did before playing the Jacksonville Jaguars in London last season, the Rams will be in and out of Australia quickly. In fact, they’re likely to spend more time on the round-trip flights than they will on the ground in Melbourne.
The plan is to arrive in Australia on Thursday, play the game Friday and head home. The plan worked in London in 2025 when they beat the Jaguars 35-7. Head coach Sean McVay acknowledged that it’s a bit of a different approach, but he and his staff believe that “staying in rhythm and routine” is of the utmost importance.
“The thinking in its simplest form is, what do we deem the best for our football players and for them to try to be at their best?” McVay said. “There are different approaches and theories. But I do have a lot of trust in our group and we’ll see. Hopefully it works out.”
The pros: The Rams’ plan centers on maintaining their current body clock in a way that aligns with the kickoff. While kickoff is in the morning Australia time, that’s still within a couple of hours of what would be a normal kickoff for a primetime game on Pacific time.
According to Mah, the Rams staying accustomed to that body clock also puts them in a window -- 4 to 8 p.m. -- that usually allows for enhanced athletic performance.
“That’s when records are broken and gold medals are won, and it’s this unique window where physical performance we know is enhanced,” Mah said. “They are likely trying to leverage this window by keeping their body clocks in that prime window. That is obviously a pro of doing so and coming in and trying to then return home quickly.”
Another advantage for the Rams is that they should have less trouble readjusting to Pacific time as they begin preparation for Week 2 and beyond.
The cons: The biggest issue for the Rams is the travel itself. The London plan worked well in part because the Rams traveled directly from Baltimore, turning an 11-hour flight into a seven-hour trip. The flight to Melbourne is more than double that, which can cause increased stress on the body.
“Every player’s going to walk off the plane stiff, every joint’s going to be aching, and it’s going to take the rehab team a lot of work just to get some fluid back in those joints,” Wright said. “But it’s not just a tired leg problem. Less than 24 hours after getting off a plane, you’ve got a whole body timing problem. And both things are happening at once for them.
“The travel fatigue from the journey itself, cramped up, no sleep. And the dehydration is real on a long flight like that. So, you’ve got the physical tiredness and then the time zone, the jet lag, which is the mismatch between body clock and local times.”
Mah said the other part of the challenge is the game’s early start time. Though their bodies might feel like they’re in their usual prime window, it’s still an unusual time to begin.
The verdict:
Mah and Wright both acknowledged that the teams’ plans have their share of advantages and disadvantages. But they also don’t believe the game’s outcome should be a referendum on either approach being superior.
“I can see why the medical teams and the staff on both sides made their decisions,” Wright said. “But do I think that one is going to have a significant advantage over the other? Not in the short amount of time that they’re actually feet on the ground.”
It’s a sentiment Mah shares, noting that one pro of the differing approaches is that it’s at least spurred meaningful dialogue about the importance of sleep and acclimation, especially on long trips.
“Sometimes it’s like whichever team wins, that’s got to be the right thing,” Mah said. “But I want to take a step back and emphasize that regardless of strength of team, there’s good evidence around how much the body clock can really have an impact on game outcomes.”
