Reece Potter

The @nflrams didn't lose to jet lag. Not exactly. The kickoff time argument was sound. 10:35am in Melbourne lines up with early evening on the West Coast body clock, right in the window players usually perform best. But a 72-hour round trip left almost no time to recover from the travel itself. Travel fatigue and jet lag are not the same problem. One is disrupted sleep, dehydration, and immobility. The other is a misaligned body clock. The consensus statement I co-authored on managing both in athletes is clear: the first three days after long-haul travel are when performance takes the biggest hit, independent of time zones. This also keeps getting reported as a 17-hour time difference. Circadian rhythms don't work that way. The body shifts in whichever direction is shorter, and here that's a 7-hour delay, not a 17-hour advance. Still hard in three days. Just not as hard as the headlines made it sound. I said it plainly to Yahoo Sports last week: if you're exhausted or sleep-deprived, your performance slips. That's the worst-case scenario. Final: @49ers 27, Rams 7. If the Rams had won, this plan would be called visionary. They didn't, so it's called reckless. Neither reaction is really about the science. Good sleep science doesn't bend to the scoreboard.