The NFL gave the Rams the break the 49ers wanted.
After San Francisco’s trip to Australia, coach Kyle Shanahan’s team asked for a Monday night game in Week 2 to buy an extra day of recovery. The league said no. The Rams, meanwhile, were handed a Monday night game after flying home from Melbourne, giving them a bonus day before they play the Giants.
Shanahan has already had “plenty of complaints about the Australia game,” and this became another one. For the 49ers, the issue is not just the long flight or the time change. It is the timing on the back end: they will host the Dolphins on Sunday at 4:25 p.m. ET, with no extra day to settle back into Pacific Time.
The contrast with the Rams is stark. Los Angeles will be on another 15-hour flight back to Los Angeles within two hours of the game ending, but it at least gets the Monday night cushion in Week 2. San Francisco, by comparison, is trying to manage the return without that same scheduling help.
The two teams also approached the trip itself very differently.
The Rams flew overnight on Tuesday, after their third practice of the week, and arrived Thursday morning local time. They coordinated a sleep schedule to nudge their body clocks toward Australia time, chartered a plane with 53 beds for players on the active roster, and treated the trip as part of a broader pattern of international planning. Last year, they did something no team had done before: instead of flying back to Los Angeles for a few days of work, they stayed in Baltimore for the entire week of practice. They also held minicamp in Hawaii, a state that had not seen the NFL in person since the 2016 Pro Bowl.
That approach is built around limiting disruption. The Rams spent about as much time traveling to and from Melbourne as they will in the city itself, and their previous Baltimore-to-London setup cut the body-clock change to five hours, compared with 17 for this Melbourne trip. The flight from Baltimore to London was about seven hours; the Melbourne trip is a 15-hour haul each way.
San Francisco went the other direction.
The 49ers packed their events into a week-long ramp-up to the game itself, and they arrived in Australia on Sept. 4, a full week before kickoff. They consulted sleep experts and coaches who routinely work in far-away locales. One quote from that planning captured the mindset: “We’ve got a long way to go, but let’s be ready to rock when that three-hour window that we’re allotted comes.’” Defensive end Nick Bosa also noted the time in Melbourne, including visits to local coffee shops.
The 49ers’ hope was straightforward: if they were going to spend that much time in Australia, they wanted the league to give them a little more time on the other end. That request was denied.
The Rams, for their part, have been comfortable leaning into the international side of the business. They have global marketing rights in seven countries, tied with the Chiefs for the most in the NFL, and one Rams team source summed up the difference this way: “The Niners get one week to activate in the market.”
That is the backdrop for the matchup now. One team got the scheduling break it asked for. The other did not. And both are trying to turn a long, unusual trip into something manageable before Week 2 even begins.