There are two basic approaches to traveling nearly 8,000 miles for a football game.
The San Francisco 49ers chose the sensible one.
The Los Angeles Rams apparently chose Door No. 2.
When the 49ers and Rams kick off their 2026 seasons Thursday night in Melbourne, Australia, they won’t just provide the NFL’s latest experiment in taking American football around the globe. They’ll also settle — or perhaps further complicate — a debate about the proper way to prepare 53 very large men to play football after transporting them halfway around the world.
The 49ers left California last week.
The Rams basically just got there.
Same game. Same destination. Same 17-hour time difference.
Two travel itineraries that could not be more different.
San Francisco departed the Bay Area late Sept. 2 aboard a chartered Qantas Airbus A380 and landed in Melbourne on the morning of Sept. 4.
Then the 49ers did something radical.
They stayed.
For an entire week.
They practiced. They adjusted their sleep schedules. They made appearances. They drank Australian coffee. Some players attended an Australian Football League playoff game at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the same massive stadium where they will face the Rams.
In other words, the 49ers have had enough time in Australia to begin developing opinions about the local restaurants.
Coach Kyle Shanahan’s approach makes intuitive sense. If you’re going to cross the International Date Line, spend roughly 16 hours on an airplane and arrive someplace where the clock says tomorrow while your body insists it’s yesterday, give yourself some time to figure things out.
And the 49ers didn’t simply arrive early and hope everybody eventually stopped waking up at 3 a.m.
San Francisco 49ers head coach opted to have his team travel to Melbourne a week early in preparation Thursday’s game with the Rams.Credit: IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect
According to Reuters, the team consulted multiple sleep and nutrition experts and provided players with detailed instructions about how to acclimate.
“There were big packets on the plane, different supplements to take at different hours, different sleep suggestions, when to stay up during the day, when to go to bed,” running back Christian McCaffrey told reporters in Melbourne.
“So any questions you think you would have had, they answered it in these packets.”
The 49ers essentially moved training camp to Melbourne for a week.
By kickoff, their players should know what day it is.
Probably.
The Rams looked at the same 7,500-plus-mile journey, the same 17-hour time difference and the same Friday morning kickoff in Melbourne and decided:
Why get there early?
Los Angeles departed Tuesday night and landed Thursday morning in Australia, a little more than a day before kickoff.
That’s not much of an acclimation period.
That’s a layover.
Sean McVay’s team is essentially treating Australia like a road game in Phoenix, only with a 16-hour flight, an international border, a missing calendar day and kangaroos.
And this wasn’t some last-minute decision by a coach who forgot to check Google Maps.
The Rams actually studied this.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles sent offensive lineman Kevin Dotson, running back Kyren Williams, receiver Xavier Smith and defensive lineman Tyler Davis to Australia during the offseason. In addition to serving as goodwill ambassadors, the four became test cases as the organization studied how players responded physically and mentally to the flight, their time in Australia and the return trip.
“They kind of used us as guinea pigs,” Dotson told the Times during training camp.
The Rams collected the information.
They consulted with their sports medicine and performance staff.
They considered the alternatives.
And then they reached their conclusion:
Wait.
“It doesn’t mean that we think we’re right and a different approach is wrong,” McVay told reporters Sunday, according to the Associated Press. “It’s just what we think is best based on the things that we’ve done and what we’ve learned over our time here.”
Their objective isn’t really to adjust to Australia at all.
It’s to avoid adjusting.
The game kicks off at 10:35 Friday morning in Melbourne.
In Los Angeles and San Francisco, it will be 5:35 Thursday afternoon.
That’s the key to the Rams’ mad-scientist experiment.
Los Angeles wants its players’ bodies to remain, as much as possible, on California time. The Rams have practiced later in the day in recent weeks, essentially preparing their internal clocks for what amounts biologically to a late-afternoon game.
Reuters reported that another consideration is what happens after the Rams leave Australia. By minimizing their adjustment to Melbourne time, the Rams hope to avoid having to reacclimate to California when they return home for Week 2.
Land Thursday.
Stay awake.
Sleep.
Get up.
Play football.
Then get back on the airplane.
The Rams plan to head home immediately after the game, making the Australian opener less of an overseas stay than an extraordinarily long business trip.
No extended sightseeing.
No leisurely tour of Melbourne.
Beat the 49ers, get on the plane and go home.
If all goes according to plan, some Rams players may return to Los Angeles still wondering what happened to Wednesday.
The contrast is wonderful.
The 49ers have spent a week convincing their bodies they live in Australia.
The Rams are trying to convince theirs they never left California.
San Francisco’s plan says jet lag is real, so respect it.
Los Angeles’ plan says jet lag can’t hurt you if you refuse to acknowledge its existence.
The 49ers arrived early enough to recover from the flight, establish a routine and become accustomed to waking up in Melbourne.
The Rams arrived late enough that their bodies might not have time to realize they’ve been tricked.
And there is logic behind both approaches.
The Rams employed a similar strategy for last season’s London game against Jacksonville, arriving the day before kickoff and hammering the Jaguars 35-7. There was one important difference: The Rams already were on the East Coast after playing Baltimore, making the trip to London considerably shorter than this week’s trans-Pacific odyssey.
Still, the experience helped influence their thinking.
“I think we saw that it worked,” Smith told the Los Angeles Times, “and it’s like mimicking the same blueprint all over again.”
The 49ers, meanwhile, took the approach most sleep experts — and probably most mothers — would recommend:
Get there early, get some rest and don’t wait until the last minute.
That makes Thursday night’s game more than an NFC West matchup.
It’s a controlled experiment with shoulder pads.
If the 49ers win, every NFL sports-science department will point toward San Francisco’s week of acclimation.
If the Rams win, McVay may have just saved NFL owners millions of dollars in hotel rooms for future international games.
Of course, football will eventually interfere with our travel experiment.
Matthew Stafford, Christian McCaffrey, Davante Adams, Nick Bosa and the rest will actually have something to say about the outcome.
Maybe travel won’t matter at all.
But sometime around the fourth quarter, if one team looks fresher than the other, we’re going to hear about those itineraries.
Was a week in Australia the perfect preparation?
Was a little more than a day plenty?
Did the Rams outsmart jet lag?
Did the 49ers conquer it?
We should have an answer sometime Thursday night.
Or Friday morning.
Depending, of course, on what day your body thinks it is.