The San Francisco 49ers will play the Tennessee Titans, Los Angeles Chargers, and Las Vegas Raiders this preseason.
Head coach Kyle Shanahan said the team is looking into joint practices against its first two preseason opponents at the podium on Thursday, saying, “Yeah, we’re most likely going to go up against Tennessee and the Chargers.”
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When asked whether playing the Chargers, a game that takes place at the end of the regular season, would factor into whether each team wants to practice against each other, Shanahan said there would be no issues:
“Not really, no. You stay pretty vanilla. You’re not scheming and stuff and doing stuff in practice; it’s just more getting guys a chance to go against a couple different things than they usually go against.”
Speaking of the schedule, Shanahan’s tone changed whenever that was brought up. For example, after the trip to Australia, the 49ers get three home games in a row. But Shanahan looks at that through a different view:
“I mean, three home games is irrelevant. That doesn’t mean anything. It means you’re going to have three more road games in December and January. So, that’s my answer on three home games.”
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There’s a trip to East Rutherford, New Jersey in December. But outside of that East Coast trip in the back half of the schedule, the furthest east the Niners will travel is Kansas City, Missouri. It could be worse.
Shanahan made it seem like it’s less about the travel and more about the lack of recovery for his players that is frustrating:
“I mean, I try to answer questions without, like I told you guys when you guys asked, I said ‘when you get it, you just deal with it.’ And that’s what I’m dealing with. Now, you’d rather not travel that much, and I don’t care as much about that. It’s more about recovery.”
He also outlined the plan for the 49ers’ trip to Melbourne:
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“Usually when you travel with a 19-hour flight, you don’t want to get there the day before because you lose like a whole day there or two and you’re just messed up. The people we’ve talked to, you don’t feel normal until like the third or fourth day. So, we’d like to go out seven days early. But, since it takes a day and a half to travel there, we’re going to go nine. I think we leave on Wednesday and land on a Friday. And so, then we get there about seven days before our game. I think it’s Friday, we play Thursday or Friday morning Australian time, Thursday here. So that’s it.”
And that led to adjusting the practice schedule:
“You have to. I mean, when we’re starting, everyone gets that bye week after your fourth week. The whole NFL gets three bonus practices and four mandatory days off. We’re traveling on that third day to Australia, so you kind of miss that week to recover and to have those days off and those bonus days. So, it ends up being about a week different than usual.
I would love to have three extra bonus practice here and then four days off like everyone. But, when you open on a Thursday on the other side of the world, you lose that because it takes a couple days to travel there. It takes a couple days to adjust. We can’t start camp earlier. Camp starts based off of, I think 15 days away from your first preseason game. So, you just lose those days.”
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The 49ers have not figured out their travel plans for Mexico City yet. Shanahan did say they will go to Colorado Springs as they did for their last Mexico City trip:
“We haven’t finalized it yet, but we’d love to stay here and go there. It’s a shorter flight, but that’s not really the issue. The main thing with Mexico City is it’s 2,000 miles higher than Denver. And so, we like to get adjusted to that altitude. So, we’ll probably go to Colorado Springs again like we did last time to get ready for that altitude and then probably go to Mexico City the night before.”
That trip will “most likely” happen straight from Dallas. Shanahan believes the Mexico City trip will take longer than the Australia trip because of the travel.
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