49ers at Rams in Melbourne: The Defensive Line Is Half Gone and I Cannot Stop Thinking About It

Week 1 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, 5:35pm Pacific on a Thursday, on Netflix. The Rams were 3.5 point favourites on a neutral field. Here is the matchup, the injury list nobody wants to look at, and the number that decides the night.

It's Thursday afternoon and the 49ers season starts at 5:35, which means I'm going to be watching football before I've finished being annoyed about the commute. Netflix has it. The game is at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, it's already Friday morning where they are, and if you think about that for too long you'll give yourself a headache, so don't. our Melbourne piece did the travel math back in August and it hasn't gotten any friendlier since.

And it isn't the flight I can't get past.

It's the defensive line. Alfred Collins is on injured reserve with a knee. Mykel Williams is out with a torn ACL. Sam Okuayinonu is on IR with a foot. James Thompson Jr is questionable with a hamstring. That's four bodies off the interior and the edge before a single snap of the season, and Nate Hobbs is on IR with a groin on top of it, so the corner room got thinner too.

Now look at who's on the other side. The Rams scored 518 points last season. Five hundred and eighteen. The 49ers scored 437 and I remember that offense being fine. Los Angeles put up eighty one more points than we did across seventeen games, and the way you slow that down is by making the quarterback uncomfortable, and the guys whose job that is are mostly in a training room in Santa Clara.

Before anybody writes in: yes, Bosa is fine. He practiced fully before the plane left and the last practice before the flight covered it, and every name you actually know made the trip. That's the point. Bosa being healthy was supposed to be the good news, and instead he's going to spend Thursday being the only guy on that line the Rams have to account for. One man can be doubled. Ask anyone who watched 2023.

I've been saying since camp that this roster is one hamstring away from being a different team. It turned out to be four.

So about that number. The Rams are laying 3.5 with the total at 48.5, and ESPN's model has them at 60.3 percent to win it. Fine. But read the 3.5 properly, because this is the part everybody's getting wrong today: nobody is at home. The Rams are the designated home team on the schedule and they're playing on a cricket ground eight thousand miles from Inglewood. There's no crowd advantage to hand out. That 3.5 isn't a home number with a road team getting points, it's the market saying flat out that Los Angeles is the better football team right now.

Maybe it is. I don't have to like it.

Last year says two things and they don't agree. Both clubs finished 12-5. They split the series and the two games looked nothing alike. San Francisco won 26 to 23 in Los Angeles in week 5, which is the closest thing either team has to a road result against the other and it went our way by a field goal. Then in week 10 the Rams came to Santa Clara and hung 42 on us. Forty two. I turned that one off in the third quarter and then lied about it to a guy at work on Monday.

So the honest read of the head to head is that we can beat them somewhere that isn't home, and they can bury us somewhere that is. Melbourne is neither.

What to watch, in order.

One. The first two Rams drives. If they walk down the field without a third down worth mentioning, the defensive line story is the whole season and not just the whole night, and you'll know inside ten minutes.

Two. Whether Shanahan leans on the run early. A short field and a clock that runs is how you protect a defense that can't get off the field, and it's also how you keep a team that just crossed the international date line from having to play a track meet.

Three. Third and long. That's where a thin front either shows up or doesn't. If we're getting pressure with four on obvious passing downs, somebody in that room has taken a step and the year looks different.

Four. Purdy's first quarter. He needs a handful of attempts to qualify for the career passer rating record and it lands around game five, which the Purdy page has been tracking. Tonight isn't about the record. It's about whether he looks like a guy who slept.

One more thing, and hardly anybody is saying it out loud. This is a divisional road game. In September. Against the team most likely to take the West. Those are worth more than one sixteenth of a season and everybody in that building knows it, which is a strange amount of weight to hang on a game that half the country will watch at lunchtime on a Friday in Australia.

I think we cover and lose. That's my honest read and I've been wrong about this team in both directions for three years running. What I'd actually take is the under, because two teams on nine hours of sleep in a stadium built for a different sport is not usually where 49 points comes from.

Reaction goes up after the whistle either way. The week by week is on the schedule hub, who's actually available is on the depth chart, the structural version of all this is in the season preview, and everything else lives on the 49ers hub.

5:35. Netflix. Try to be somewhere you can yell.

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