I don't want to claim outright that the other NFL owners have it in for the San Francisco 49ers, but it sure feels that way.
According to various sources, the 49ers will lead the league in travel mileage, racking up 37,862 air miles. Much of this is from the Week 1 game in Australia, but the Rams, their opponent there, will travel 3,000 miles less during the season. The Carolina Panthers will travel almost 30,000 miles less.
Of course, air mileage is greatly affected by the location of division rivals. The Niners have to fly to Seattle (1,417 miles) and Arizona (1,219 miles), while the Pittsburgh Steelers have to go 230, 392, and 513 miles to play division opponents Cleveland, Baltimore, and Cincinnati, respectively. That 1,135 miles combined is less than either the Cardinals or Seahawks trip alone.
But that is not the whole story. Setting aside the Rams game in Melbourne, the Niners play two games in the Eastern Time Zone and three in the Central Time Zone. That's five games outside their own time zone.
Add to that, the scheduling has the Niners playing at 1:00 p.m. for their games against the Falcons and Giants. That's two games at what would be 10:00 a.m. for their body clocks.
The NFL has been notorious for scheduling West Coast teams to play early games when they travel east, which is one reason the Niners started staying on the East Coast when they had back-to-back games there. (The Seahawks and Rams have only one such game this year.)
There is no excuse for not scheduling East Coast games at 4:15 or at night. There is always at least one late-afternoon game televised on Sundays and sometimes two. Considering there are only six teams (SF, Las Vegas, the LA Rams and LA Chargers, Seattle, and the Cardinals about half the season) who are on Pacific Time, and only two (Denver and Arizona the other half) on Mountain Time, there is no reason the league can't schedule any West Coast team for a late game.
In addition, the Niners play two international games without a true bye week after either of them. (The Australia game is mid-week, so only ten days rather than the normal two weeks when a bye week occurs in other parts of the season.)
The opponent matters, too. Clearly, whoever is designated the home team is getting long-term disadvantages because they lose their fans, and though the Niners are losing their edge in an away game (SoFi Stadium is called Levi's South for a reason), either opponent is losing a potential benefit. Because of that, teams in the same division should not play one another. The stakes are too high.
While the NFL seems to have done a decent job in that regard, with six of the international games between teams in different conferences, of the three games between conference opponents, the 49ers play two, one of which is against a division arch-rival.
(While the Jaguars play against a divisional opponent—the Texans in week 6—they are playing two international games in back-to-back weeks and will therefore be acclimated to the time. The Texans do not have that luxury.)
Considering the schedulers made the Niners play four games—a quarter of their contests—on a short week last year, is it any wonder the team was worn down at the end of the season? And at the very end, they played back-to-back short-week games, one of them for the top seed in the NFC. We'll never know if that final game against Seattle would have turned out differently if the Niners had not played on short rest two weeks in a row, but it didn't help. (Losing George Kittle was the bigger blow, but still.)
Now, is it collusion on the part of the other owners? Perhaps nothing one could prove in a court of law, but one has to wonder if Forty-Niner owner Jed York has done enough to pressure the league to change its ways. Yes, some owners have more clout than others—the Cowboys' Jerry Jones comes to mind—but York should do more.
He should speak loudly at the end of the year and again when those doing the scheduling are set to meet. If his team gets the short end of the stick anyway, he should get even louder. Other owners in the west would likely join him, and in a few years, the league might move away from its prejudices.
Fans might not like "loud-mouth" owners, but most reasonable fans would see the logic and not criticize.
More importantly, fans don't care how (supposedly) obnoxious their owner is if the result is winning games. Jed York needs to remember that and prioritize fairness. A division championship or conference seeding might be on the line. And that's worth speaking up about.
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