Wondering about the best way to plan your next work trip? A bunch of football players might hold the answer.
The San Francisco 49ers take on the Los Angeles Rams Thursday in a clash of divisional rivals AND warring ideologies over the best way to travel for work.
The game kicks off from Melbourne, Australia, at 8:35 p.m. ET on Netflix because the NFL won’t stop until it has more money than God growing its global football fandom. International games aren’t new to the league, but the 17-hour time difference between Melbourne and California makes for a massive travel challenge.
And the teams playing are taking very different approaches to their roughly 16-hour flights.
The 49ers got to Melbourne almost a week ago, choosing to arrive early to acclimate to the time change. The Rams, meanwhile, departed LA on Tuesday night, arriving roughly 24 hours before kickoff. When it’s all said and done, they’ll spend about as much time traveling to and from Melbourne as they do actually being there.
It’s a strategy both teams have used before.
In recent years, the 49ers have avoided traveling home four different times when they’ve had back-to-back games far from San Francisco. Last year, the Rams didn’t get to London until about 30 hours before kickoff, choosing to set up camp in Baltimore, where they had played the previous week.
Both approaches were successful — the 49ers went 7-1 on those four road trips, and the Rams swept their games in Baltimore and London.
But Australia is a completely different animal.
No right answers when traveling for work
The Rams and 49ers’ differing approaches highlight the wide range of opinions people have on the best way to travel.
At the World Economic Forum in Switzerland this year, I asked executives for tips for long-haul flights. There wasn’t a consensus.
“Just sleep whenever you can,” David Steinbach, Global Chief Investment Officer at Hines, told me in January. “It is a deficit, and you just try to build it back anyway you can.”
“I don’t try to get on any time. I just kind of let the body guide you,” he added.
Meanwhile …
“My biggest thing is getting on the plane and immediately going into the time zone I’m going into,” Lisa Stevens, Aon’s Chief Administrative Officer, told me. “I don’t oversleep.”
(For what it’s worth, I try getting sleep on red-eye flights right away. But I’ll be damned if I won’t accept a free meal when they start handing them out.)
One thing the two NFL teams did agree on: How to get there. The Rams and 49ers both took the Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger aircraft. In a video from inside the plane, Rams player Byron Young called the setup “boujee.”
On the field … or conference hall
You might argue that either team’s success or failure doesn’t correlate with the work most of us do. I die a little inside when executives compare themselves to professional athletes in LinkedIn posts, but the physical and mental aspects of work travel weigh on us all.
You might not need to run a 40-yard dash, but you will get your steps in at a spread-out conference. And you’re wrong if you don’t think the NFL is a thinking man’s game. Can you identify split-field zone coverage that’s been disguised with some fake blitzes? Didn’t think so.
Don’t rush to book your work trip based on tonight’s results, though. Jet lag can have a long tail, something the 49ers have seen firsthand. San Francisco went 1-3 in the next game after those four extended road trips I mentioned before.
Bill Simmons, a sports media personality who has talked about this topic extensively, said he could see the 49ers winning tonight but struggling in the weeks to come as they readjust after their long acclimation in Australia.
As for oddsmakers, they’re giving the edge to the Rams, who are 3.5-point favorites. That means the Rams need to win by at least 4 points for your bet to hit. (I wouldn’t take that action, but I’m also not in a position to be giving anyone gambling advice.)
It’s tough to read too much into the odds since the Rams are viewed as the favorite to win the Super Bowl.
But if they get that far, they won’t have to worry about travel logistics.
This season’s Super Bowl is being held at SoFi Stadium … home to the Los Angeles Rams.
