The Niners Are on the Ground in Melbourne, 15 Hours in the Air and 17 Hours Ahead of Us
A Qantas A380 charter put 200 of them down at 7:50 in the morning Melbourne time, which was Thursday afternoon at my desk. Shanahan wanted nine days for a reason. The Rams are doing the opposite.
They're there. Wheels down at Melbourne Airport at 7:50 in the morning, Friday, local time, which was Thursday afternoon here while I was pretending to read an email. Qantas A380, the whole traveling party, roughly 200 people, 7,855 miles, a little over 15 hours in the air. The Niners are in Australia. I've typed that sentence four times now and it still doesn't sound like a real thing my football team did.
Australia. Actual Australia.
Seventeen hours ahead. I sat there with my phone doing the arithmetic like an idiot, because 17 is the number that breaks your brain. It isn't just a different clock, it flips the day on you. When they're at practice in the Melbourne morning, I'm asleep. When I'm eating lunch, they're already into the next night. My group chat spent twenty minutes arguing about whether Friday over there is Thursday here before somebody finally posted a screenshot of the world clock and shut everybody up. It was me. I posted it. I'd looked it up three times to be sure.
Nine days early, and Shanahan didn't dress it up. "The people we've talked to, you don't feel normal until like the third or fourth day," he said when they were still planning this. "So, we'd like to go out seven days early. But since it takes a day and a half to travel there, we're going to go nine." That's the entire strategy. Get the bodies over there, let them be miserable early in an empty week, and be normal humans by the time it counts.
The Rams are doing the exact opposite and it's making me nervous. They don't fly until the 9th. They land Thursday evening over there, about a day before kickoff, and the whole idea is to never leave Pacific time at all. Wake up on the west coast clock, play the game on the west coast clock, go home. If it works, every team in this league copies it inside a year and our nine day camping trip looks like we overthought it. If it doesn't work, they're going to look like men sleepwalking through the second half.
I have no idea which one is right. Neither does anybody else, that's the fun part.
Keion White is handling the flight the way I would have. "I don't know if you can OD on melatonin, but I'm gonna try," he said before they left. "Take like five melatonin, go to sleep on the plane. Soon as I wake up, I'm taking five more, and keep it rolling like that." Five. Then five more. I laughed out loud at that and then remembered I take one gummy and feel like I've been hit with a shovel.
The names that matter were on the plane. Kittle got on it, Bosa got on it, after a summer where I aged a decade watching both of them do walkthroughs in bucket hats. Sam Okuayinonu is the one who's out, a foot, and he had three sacks last year so that's a real subtraction off the rotation, but I'm not going to lie to you and pretend that's what I've been staring at.
Both of them got on the plane. That's the update and it's enough.
They practice light Saturday morning over there, which is Friday for us, and then the normal game week routine doesn't start until Monday. So there's this weird floating weekend where the team is on the other side of the planet doing basically nothing on purpose. Walking around. Eating at the wrong times. Standing in the sun so their bodies figure out it's daytime.
Then it's the MCG. Friday afternoon in Melbourne, Thursday night here, 5:35 Pacific, and the whole thing lands on Netflix. Which means I'm watching a 49ers season opener on a Thursday, before dinner, on a streaming service, from a cricket ground with a hundred thousand seats in it. Nothing about that sentence existed when I started caring about this team.
The 155th time they've played the Rams. The third time it's been Week 1. First time either franchise has done it in a country where the game starts before anybody here gets home from work.
I'm not sleeping right this week either and I never left the house. Full slate on the 2026 schedule hub, the bodies on the roster and depth chart, the night they left is in the wheels up column, and the rest of this summer is on the 49ers hub.
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