The Rams and 49ers are headed to Australia with very different ideas about how to handle the trip.
Los Angeles and San Francisco will kick off the 2026 NFL regular season on September 10 at 8:30 p.m. E.T., which works out to shortly before 11 a.m. local time. It’s a roughly 8,000-mile journey, but the two teams are not treating it the same way at all.
The 49ers are scheduled to leave for Australia today, September 2, giving themselves several days to settle in before game day. The Rams, by contrast, are taking the fast-and-furious approach. Sean McVay’s team is expected to fly into Melbourne the day before the game and leave immediately afterward, ESPN reported last month.
The Rams think that setup could help them avoid jet lag by not giving it much time to set in. The 49ers are betting on the opposite idea: arrive early, adjust, and be ready when kickoff arrives.
McVay has not publicly confirmed the team’s departure date, but he did offer one clue. “We’re leaving later than most people would probably expect,” he did admit.
Asked which plan makes the most sense, neurologist and sleep specialist W. Christopher Winter came down firmly on the Rams’ side.
“Athletes generally reach their physical peak in the late afternoon and early evening,” Winter told Yahoo. “So what the Rams are essentially doing is saying to their players, ‘Look, just keep being athletically awesome at 6 p.m.
You’re going to open your eyes one day and the sun’s going to be in a weird part of the sky, but we’re banking on it taking your brain a couple days to figure out what the hell’s going on. By then you’ll have already beaten the 49ers and you’ll be heading home.’”
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