Before the NFL season kicks off this weekend, it will kick off Wednesday night with a primetime game between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks. And then on Thursday night it will kick off again, with a game between the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams, except that game will actually be happening on Friday morning, on account of it being played in Melbourne, Australia. Probably nobody should ask the Rams what day it is when they arrive for the game, because they won't have much time to get acclimated. They aren't leaving Los Angeles until tonight.
Rams head coach Sean McVay made the team's travel plans known over the weekend, telling reporters that the team will be boarding a flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne on Tuesday night, and arriving in Australia roughly 24 hours before their game against the 49ers kicks off. The flight from L.A. to Melbourne is roughly 16 hours, which when combined with the 17-hour time difference between the two cities, means that it will be Thursday morning in Australia when the Rams finally land. The game starts at 10:35 a.m. local time on Friday, which leaves the players about a day to acclimate and rest before kickoff.
The 49ers left home almost a week ago, and have been practicing in Melbourne this whole time. The Rams are insistent that their plan is better, though, in part because of how they successfully navigated a game in London last season. After beating the Ravens in Week 6, the Rams stayed on the East Coast for a few days before flying to London the day before their Week 7 game against the Jaguars, which they won 35-7. Of course the potential destabilizing effects of a flight from the East Coast to London is nowhere near those presented by one from L.A. to Melbourne, but McVay told reporters that every player on the flight will have a lie-flat bed.
The Rams' plan is meant to entirely negate the effects of jet lag, but it depends on rather precise timing and each player being able to sleep when they're supposed to. The theory appears sound: If you take off from L.A. on Tuesday evening, spend a few hours watching movies and relaxing, and then sleep for the final eight or so hours of flight time, you should be rested and already on a normal sleep cycle by the time you land in Australia on Thursday morning. But what if something goes wrong? What if the flight is delayed? What if Matt Stafford does something that I recently saw a middle-aged man do on an international flight, and watches Hamnet, becomes so moved by it that he immediately starts it over from the beginning, and then fails to fall asleep due to the emotional damage he's suffered? Huh? What then?
As fun as it is to try and decipher the Rams' thinking, and for the narrative surrounding this game to largely be about which team's travel itinerary will be vindicated, it's ridiculous that the NFL has allowed its hunger for international markets to turn one of the season's most anticipated matchups into a logistical contest. The London and Germany games were a fun little novelty when they started and only imposed on bad teams nobody cared about, but now we've somehow arrived at the point where two of the league's best teams are being forced to open the season on the other side of the world, and the result of the game may largely depend on which team takes its melatonin gummies at the most effective time. That is of course what every NFL fan wants, to tune into an important game and see some of the world's best athletes compete to prove who is the best at international travel.
Keep all this in mind of the game turns out to be a 13-10 snoozer, and consider how NFL commissioner Roger Goodell might see his spiffy new contract extension as encouragement to continue compromising the quality of the NFL's product for the sake of reaching new markets. Maybe by 2029 we'll be gearing up to watch the NFL season open with a Super Bowl rematch in Riyadh.
