The San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams have some unique circumstances for their Week 1 showdown in two weeks, as the two teams are traveling across the world to Australia.
The game is set to be played on the morning of September 11th local time, with it being televised in the United States at 5:35 p.m. on September 10th.
Despite the 17-hour time difference, Los Angeles plans to execute a similar plan to their London trip from a previous international game, where they arrived late and didn’t spend much time in the host country before the game, landing just the day before. The Rams proceeded to beat up on the Jacksonville Jaguars 35-7 in that London game, and flew back directly after.
While head coach Sean McVay hasn’t confirmed any plans, he did mention earlier this offseason that the Rams will likely have a similar plan to that London game, minimizing their stay in Australia.
The 49ers are doing a much different plan. They’re leaving to Australia a full week early to acclimate to the time change, with head coach Kyle Shanahan saying that was recommended by scientists.
“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,” Shanahan said this week. “So, you ask people who’ve done it a number of times, you ask people who study it, you take all their opinions in.
“We’ve been strongly recommended to. When you’ve got a 19-hour flight and it’s a 16-hour-something difference, I forgot because I haven’t asked since we were making these decisions, but it’s a big adjustment on the body. So, 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 what I was reported on and our players weren’t at all. So that helped me get off the fence.”
San Francisco does have a lot on its plate ahead of the game with its number of injury decisions to go with the long plane ride.
“I’m just hoping our team’s healthy enough and has the time to get there,” Shanahan continued. “Those are the challenges of it, just to get there to prepare for it. Guys still trying to recover to get there, the plane flight and things like that. But once you do get there and stuff, we’re going to have fun playing in another country and it’s going to be a cool atmosphere, things like that. That’ll all be good. But right now, I’m just thinking of the challenges of getting our team ready for those three and a half hours.”
We’ll see if either travel strategy ends up having any residual effects, but the 49ers and Rams seem to be taking two vastly different approaches with the Australia travel. One has worked for one team before, while the other is brand new to the situation.
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