49ers, Rams made wildly different Australia plans. Sleep scientists can't believe their luck

MELBOURNE, Australia – You might think this game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams is an important season opener between rivals that is oddly being played in Australia. 

But for sleep scientists this is an intriguing real-world experiment in what works and what doesn’t for elite athletes.

“It is a fascinating situation that everyone is going to watch,” said Dr. Cheri D. Mah, a sleep physician and performance specialist who is an adjunct professor at the Stanford Sleep Institute and has worked with several professional teams, including the Seattle Seahawks. “I do feel like often in these scenarios, it’s like, whoever wins then that was the right strategy.”

Will it be the long-term planning 49ers? Or the slap-dash, in-and-out Rams?

“This is fascinating: a test of two completely different approaches to coping with long-haul travel and a big time zone change,” wrote Greg Roach, a professor at the Appleton Institute for Behavioural Sciences’ Sleep Lab in Adelaide, Australia, in an email. “I am looking forward to seeing the outcome.”

The 49ers and the Rams could not be taking more different approaches to how to play the first ever NFL game in Australia, the farthest two NFL teams have ever traveled for a game.

The 49ers have been here so long, they could be saying “G’day” and pronouncing their new town’s name as “Melbin.” They arrived Friday morning, a full week before the game will be played (the game is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Friday local time, to air in a normal Thursday Night Football slot back home on Netflix). Although they did a light practice on Saturday, their first official full practice was scheduled for Monday.

“It took a couple of days to adjust but I’m feeling good today,” head coach Kyle Shanahan said Monday morning. “Some guys feel great and then you talk to them five hours later and they’re like, ‘Never mind. That left.’ Some guys started off bad and then feel good later. I felt my most normal today, the third day … I’m glad we’ve been out here because we feel really good today.”

The Rams, in wild contrast, won’t arrive until Thursday, the day before the game. The players will stumble off a plane after being up all day Wednesday, taking a 16-plus hour flight, losing a full day and then will play a game the next morning. 

Even though news of the Rams’ unconventional approach leaked out weeks ago, head coach Sean McVay was reluctant to address it until he had to last week. 

“Everything is geared toward what we think is best for players,” McVay said. “The thinking in its simplest form is what do we deem best for the players for them to try to be at their best. … Ultimately it’s let’s go be at our best in that three-and-a-half-hour window that we’re allotted.

“Hopefully,” McVay added, “it works out.”

It is certainly a high-stakes risk for the team anointed Super Bowl favorites. Rams fans believe they have their own successful history as precedent. Last October, the Rams took the same approach to playing Jacksonville in London and won 35–7. But, for that game, they flew from the East Coast, having stayed in Baltimore to practice after a game there, and then hopped on a seven-hour flight, arriving just 30 hours before the London game. 

However, flying 16 hours to Melbourne, and losing an entire day, is a different proposition.

“This is different: a 16-hour flight, flying in and out,” Mah said. “I do think it will be challenging for them to feel as fresh as they want to, given such long travel and playing essentially immediately after arriving. That would be my biggest concern.”

The 49ers and Rams, of course, are not traveling like you or me, hunkered down in a coach seat behind a screaming baby. The 49ers flew on a double-decker Qantas plane that had 14 first class “suites,” that Shanahan assigned based on size and seniority, and 70 more business class lay-flat seats. 

But even the most accommodating plane set-ups don’t nullify the impact of air travel, especially for enormous football players. Trent Williams, 6-foot-5 and 320 pounds, said before the trip that he finds airline travel to be “torture” and that lay-flat beds generally aren’t comfortable for anyone taller than 6-1.

“A lay-flat bed is, of course, going to be better than having to sit up in a coach seat,” Mah said. “But at the end of the day these athletes still have to endure the jet lag that their bodies are going through, the long flight, the travel fatigue. It’s not going to eliminate a lot of the challenges on their bodies’ physiology and their sleep.”

Christian McCaffrey said the players were inundated with information on how to adjust.

“I can’t imagine being more detailed than what they gave us,” the 49ers running back said before Monday’s practice.  “There were big packets on the plane, (with) different supplements to take at different hours, different sleep suggestions, when to stay up during the day, when to go to bed. Any questions you had, they answered, so we’re really prepared.

“You’ve just got to be really diligent with the recovery, the training, when you’re eating, when you’re taking caffeine, when you’re napping, when you’re not napping. … They talked to all the experts in the world on it.” 

Roach lays out the two main issues players will have to deal with: travel fatigue and jet lag. The elements of travel fatigue are sleep loss, dehydration, hypoxia (not enough oxygen in the blood) and discomfort from being in a confined space with sub-optimal conditions like low air pressure and low humidity. Jet lag symptoms include headache, irritability, daytime sleepiness, difficulty sleeping at night, gastrointestinal issues, and poor mental and physical performance.

 “Arguments can be made for and against both approaches.” Roach wrote. 

As wild as the Rams’ plan sounds, sleep specialists are not dismissing their approach. Because they are refusing to acclimate to local time, they will be playing the game in a peak performance window: the normal time for Thursday night football.

“From a pure body clock standpoint, if the Rams stay on their home time zone, that will work to their advantage,” Mah said. “What works against them is the short turnaround with a long flight. There’s going to be travel fatigue, dehydration, not great sleep. But there are pros and cons to both strategies.”

Mah said that studies show that athletes have peak performances in late afternoon/early evening.

“From four to eight p.m. is when performance is enhanced,” Mah said. “That’s when we see gold medals won, world records set, and so the more a sports organization can try to play within that window, the more it works to your advantage.”

Here’s another troublesome thing to keep in mind, something that the injury-prone 49ers may have considered when making their plans to spend a week in Melbourne before the game.

“When are you exercising? Are you minimizing the intensity?” Mah wondered, “Because you can have a higher risk of injuries after significant international flights.”

And though NFL teams notoriously like to take it one game at a time, the bigger issue for both teams may come after returning home. The 49ers will be back Friday and will have 10 days (having gained a day on the way home) before playing again the next Sunday. The Rams, much to the 49ers’ annoyance, will get an extra day and won’t play until Monday night. 

Sleep science says that the Rams will have an easier time on their return, especially with the extra day. They will play the Giants on Monday Night Football on Sept. 21, again in that optimal performance window. The 49ers will play the Dolphins at home on Sunday, Sept. 20, at 1 p.m. PDT. If they have not fully adjusted back to California time, it could feel like early morning.

They might not be sure what time it is, but the players will definitely know this: Whoever is the loser of the great sleep science experiment played out at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, that second game will become desperation time.

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This article originally published at 49ers, Rams made wildly different Australia plans. Sleep scientists can’t believe their luck.