MELBOURNE, Australia — The San Francisco 49ers easily dispatched the “withered” — and perhaps jet-lagged — Los Angeles Rams on Friday, 27-7, scoring a decisive victory for hyper-punctual business travelers around the globe.
The NFL’s first regular-season game in Australia showcased competing, radically opposing strategies on how to battle jet lag in long-haul international travel with the Niners showing up early and the Rams late.
“It was definitely worth it, coming a little bit early,” said 49ers wide receiver Mike Evans, who caught six passes for 49 yards and a touchdown.
“I felt like we got acclimated. DP (strength and conditioning coach Dustin Perry) and (coach) Kyle (Shanahan) did a great job of getting us there early, and all the guys, we attacked it. We didn’t complain. We actually enjoyed being out here in Melbourne,” he said.
The victorious 49ers arrived in Melbourne on Sept. 4 for an NFC West battle that kicked off at 10:37 a.m. AEST on Friday — or 8:37 p.m. EDT/5:37 p.m. PDT on Thursday.
“San Francisco was the smarter team because it takes at least a week to do this kind of big shift,” Dr. Mandana Mahmoudi, a sleep specialist from NYU Langone Health, told NBC News on Friday following the Niners’ win. “It was a very good experiment, and the disparity in results showed.”
The vanquished Rams, who entered Friday’s contest as a 3.5-point favorite, didn’t get into town until early Thursday morning Down Under time, about 28 hours ahead of kickoff.
“It boggles my mind who came up with this strategy,” University of California San Francisco neurologist and sleep expert Dr. Kin Yuen said. “I mean, they have a lot of very smart people in sleep (research) in L.A., so I don’t know with whom they consulted.”
Rams coach Sean McVay stood by the team’s approach despite the one-sided loss.
“We thought that was the best plan of attack in terms of our approach,” McVay told reporters after the game. “We didn’t have the result that we wanted today.”
San Francisco outscored L.A., 17-0, after halftime, and 49ers linebacker Fred Warner said the Rams clearly weakened down the stretch.
“I think it was definitely a matter of us feeling like we got stronger as the game went on,” Warner said. “The opposing team, it felt like they kind of withered away.”
San Francisco appeared to have taken the more conventional game plan to beat jet lag, getting to its destination as far ahead of kickoff as possible and living a week in the new time zone to recover from a brutal 15-hour-plus plane ride.
L.A.’s unconventional strategy was aimed at keeping the players’ body clocks on schedule, in hopes of tricking their heads, torsos, arms and legs into believing it was just another 5:37 p.m. kickoff.
The fallacy in that approach, Mahmoudi and Yuen both said, is equating 15 or more hours in a pressurized tube at 30,000 feet to any other 15-hour-plus stretch of time on the ground.
“They assume that’s as restful, and it’s not restful at all,” Mahmoudi said. “You’re not getting the same restoration compared to the quiet of your own bedroom. You’re up in the air. The airplane moves. You go in and out (of sleep). It’s not like they each have their own private airplane; they’re all in that same cabin.”
When the Rams landed early Thursday in Melbourne, the shock of seeing morning sunlight when it was early afternoon in L.A. must have been a traumatic bodily experience for players, Yuen said.
“The brain is very discombobulated,” Yuen said. “The interaction with all of those environmental elements and trying to make sense of the whole deal, the brain gets very confused.”
The Rams took a similar approach last season when they beat the Jacksonville Jaguars, 35-7, in a game played at London’s Wembley Stadium. L.A. flew into the British capital on the Saturday before its Sunday contest.
But when the Rams touched down in London, they had come a much shorter distance — from Maryland, where L.A. had won in Baltimore the weekend prior and stayed most of the following week.
They flew 7 hours before landing in a location 5 hours ahead, making for a much less grueling journey than this L.A.-to-Melbourne odyssey.
“If it’s a short trip, a work trip, then you could almost benefit from trying to stay as close as possible to U.S. time back in your home time,” Dr. Mahmoudi said.
“But if you’re going to the opposite side of the world and you’re trying to match the game time to your wake time back in L.A., there’s still a degree of rest on that flight that’s not as good as a good night’s sleep in a proper room.”
Still, McVay said he wasn’t going to second-guess the team’s effort to stick with a normal domestic sleep-work schedule.
“I don’t believe that’s why we didn’t play well enough. I really don’t,” McVay said. “Listen, I’m more than comfortable (with the travel schedule). That’s something I’ll always make the decisions that I think are the best for the football team.”
The Rams ended up spending nearly as much time flying as on the ground in Australia.
“It’s easy in hindsight to say it was a miss,” McVay said. “Those are responsibilities that I’ll take. Then you got to be able to look at it. I’ll always look at myself inside out and figure out where I can improve.”
At least a handful of 49ers had no idea they had arrived in Australia so far ahead of the Rams.
“When did they get out here?” 49ers wide receiver Evans asked reporters after the game.
When told L.A. showed up in Australia on Thursday, Evans appeared to be genuinely shocked.
“Oh, dang!” he said. “I mean, you got to give your body time to adjust.”
Janis Mackey Frayer reported from Melbourne, and David K. Li from New York City.
