The San Francisco 49ers are treating the Melbourne trip like a science project. The Los Angeles Rams are treating it like a short road swing. Week 1 will test which bet pays.
General manager John Lynch said Tuesday on KNBR that San Francisco's early departure - leaving the Bay Area on Wednesday, Sept. 2, to arrive in Melbourne on Friday, Sept. 4 - grew out of conversations with sports scientists, sleep experts and rugby personnel who travel internationally for a living, NBC Sports Bay Area reported.
The Rams, by contrast, plan to arrive one day before the game at Melbourne Cricket Ground.
"We didn't really focus on what the Rams were doing," Lynch said. "We focused on doing a study from every angle, from talking to sports science people, from talking to sleep experts." He said the club also briefed its leadership council on the data. "Overwhelmingly, our players felt like wanting to get down there."
Three days out of whack
Lynch called an advance staff trip the "final straw." The group reported feeling off for about three days after landing. That feedback, he said, locked in a schedule built not only for the opener but for the weeks after the return home.
As a player, Lynch recalled a Super Bowl champion roster that played a preseason game in Japan and "felt like we were off for multiple weeks after it."
Kyle Shanahan had been more skeptical of the early leave until the same briefings piled up. "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," Shanahan said in late August, according to Sports Illustrated.
He cited a flight on the order of 19 hours and a time difference of roughly 16 hours. "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."
The practical result is nearly a week of practices, walk-throughs and sleep adjustment on Australian clocks before kickoff. The Netflix U.S. window is 5:35 p.m. PT / 8:35 p.m. ET Thursday, Sept. 10 - Friday morning in Melbourne - for the NFL's first regular-season game in Australia.