SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) — The San Francisco 49ers got instructions for how to prepare for the longest road trip in NFL history as they get set to depart the Bay Area for Melbourne, Australia, late Wednesday night for the season opener against the Los Angeles Rams next week.
They were given advice on how to eat and hydrate, what to do after arriving and the best options of when to sleep on the approximately 8,000-mile flight that will take about 16
hours and cross the international dateline that will make a Wednesday departure turn into a Friday arrival.
Niners defensive lineman and avid world traveler Keion White has a simple approach.
“I don’t know if you can OD on melatonin, but I’m going to try,” he said. “Take five melatonins, go to sleep on the plane. As soon as I wake up, I’m taking five more. Just keep rolling like that.”
While some members of the 49ers organization, including coach Kyle Shanahan, have been lamenting the season-opening trip, White is embracing it after already playing games in Germany and London earlier in his career.
He plans to watch TikTok before he arrives to get ideas of what to do and then get on public transportation and explore after team meetings on the first day to help make sure he stays up all day and gets onto a normal sleep schedule as quickly as possible.
“I’m an experience guy,” he said. “If I’m up, walking around, just going to go do stuff, I’ll be up. Just go explore. We will have meetings and everything like that, but once I do that, I’m out exploring Melbourne and getting around town.”
Both the 49ers and Rams studied the process intently in the offseason, even sending advance staffers to Australia to report back on how long it took to adjust to the time change. But they came up with far different answers leading up to the game on Sept. 11.
The Niners will leave Wednesday night in California, arrive in Melbourne on Friday morning and then take time to adjust to the new time zone. They will hold a light practice on Saturday, take Sunday off and then have a normal stretch of three practices on Monday through Wednesday before playing the opener on Friday morning.
They will leave right after the game and are expected to land back in the Bay Area on Friday afternoon. They then will be able to take the weekend off before preparing for the Week 2 game against Miami on Sept. 20.
“It’s a big adjustment on the body,” Shanahan said. “So, the recommendation for everybody has been to tell us when to go, and it’s made a lot of sense. I know how our players feel also. I was a little bit on the fence. Science wasn’t and what I was reported on and our players weren’t at all. So that helped me get off the fence.”
The Rams consulted with their own scientists and came up with the opposite approach. They will do most of their practice at home and aren’t expected to arrive in Australia until about 24 hours before the game, hoping the short stay leads to no jet lag.
The better option might not be known until after the game.
The approach by the Niners has made the past few days a whirlwind. The players got the weekend off after playing the final exhibition game on Thursday night in Las Vegas and resumed practice on Monday — the day after the roster was reduced to 53 players.
The front office had to make those cuts, put together a practice squad and figure out which players would be healthy for Week 1 to make sure they had the correct roster in place before departing.
“There’s a lot behind the scenes,” general manager John Lynch said. “Our logistics folks, our folks that work in the cafe, have just gone to tremendous lengths, our health and performance team, to make sure that we’re giving our players the best opportunity to feel right when they play down there in Australia. Everything from getting visas, which much more complicated than I ever knew, and they’ve been outstanding. ... Hats off to those guys for pulling off a monumental task, and it’s not done yet.”
Lynch said he had to make sure all the practice squad players he wanted to sign had passports with one needing his parents to send it overnight. It was an even bigger scramble for offensive lineman Jarrett Patterson, who was acquired in a trade from Houston on Sunday.
“They were like, hey, do you have a passport? We're leaving for Australia in three days,” he said. “I was like, ‘Whoa!’ It's obviously a quick turnaround getting here a couple hours after I found out and now getting ready for Australia.”
But in all, the players are welcoming the challenge and opportunity. Cornerback Deommodore Lenoir said he'd travel 30 hours if needed to play in an NFL game and rookie De'Zhaun Stribling has a must-see item on his to-do list before making his debut.
“I kind of want to see a kangaroo, just because," he said. "To see how big they are.”
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