The Rams didn’t just lose to the San Francisco 49ers 27-7 in front of 100,021 people who’d never watched an NFL game live in person before — they lost the entire “superteam” argument they’d spent the whole offseason building.
This was the first regular-season NFL game ever played in Australia, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and the final got ugly fast. San Francisco trailed 7-3 before Brock Purdy started finding people in the end zone, and the 49ers closed it out on 24 unanswered points. Matthew Stafford, fresh off the $55 million extension that was supposed to buy stability at the position, threw for 155 yards and got pulled late in the fourth quarter.
The Los Angeles Rams didn’t get here by accident. This offseason they made the Myles Garrett trade that was supposed to win them a Super Bowl, then handed Stafford that extension on top of it. The idea was simple: this roster finally had the star power to match its continuity, and continuity was supposed to be the separator between the Rams and every other pretender with a good quarterback.
None of that showed up in Melbourne.
https://twitter.com/NFLMemes/status/2098245732117475329
I had actual money on Los Angeles, because that’s what a Jets fan with a gambling problem does when a favorite is sitting right there, and the sportsbooks were with me on the pregame line that had 76% of the money on LA. Third down killed all of it. The Rams went 2-of-9 on third down and 1-of-3 on fourth. Those are the numbers of a team that never got comfortable enough to execute, jet lag or no jet lag.
But that’s not even the most interesting part. The 49ers landed in Melbourne roughly a week before kickoff. The Rams’ own front office had spent two years and sent fifteen staffers tracking players’ sleep rhythms specifically for a trip like this, sent four players over on advance scouting visits back in the spring — and then flew the actual team in about 28 hours before kickoff anyway.
McVay was asked about all of it after the game and didn’t exactly help himself: “I know there’s gonna be a lot of narratives that appropriately put the blame on me, and then we’ll move forward the right way … I don’t believe (the travel plan) is why we didn’t play well enough. I really don’t.”
Commentator Alex Brasky called it “the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen,” and it’s hard to argue with him when the organization that studies jet lag for a living decided its own research didn’t apply to it.
https://twitter.com/TFG_Football/status/2098245671430029769
I’ll give McVay this much: it’s Week 1. One loss on a stage nobody on this roster had ever set foot on before doesn’t erase a talented team, and if the Rams show up rested for the rest of the season, none of this matters by December. The scoreline was just the proof. The real story is a coaching staff that treated a two-years-in-the-planning trip like a normal Tuesday walkthrough, then got surprised when the team looked like it had never left home.
Nobody’s calling for McVay’s job over one game in Melbourne, and nobody should. But you don’t get to spend two years and fifteen staffers building a jet-lag plan, then skip your own advice for the one trip it was actually designed for, and call the result a fluke.
The Rams didn’t lose the superteam label to the 49ers. They lost it to their own travel department.
