Rams/49ers Was Terrible And Roger Goodell Deserved It For Exporting One Of Our Great NFL Rivalry To Australia For A Friday Morning Game
I'm glad it sucked.
Not this guy's seat. I feel bad that these people bought "front row" seats to Rams / 49ers in Australia and are eye-level with the action about a mile away. At least he saw his team win. Well, kinda saw it from those seats.
No, I'm glad the game itself was bad.
Rams / 49ers sucked.
The Niners handled the Rams 27-7 in a DREADFULLY boring game. Now, bad football is still football, so I watched it. But at one point, Noah Eagle came back from break on Netflix and said something like- and I'm paraphrasing here- "A perfect setting and a perfect day for Rams / 49ers..."
Yep, the weather looked very nice. But try selling that perfect setting crap to the people who shelled out $600 for these seats.
Not being a Debbie Downer at all, Don.
The NFL wanted a Friday Night International game to start the season. Becasue the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 says they can't play on Friday nights and Saturdays, they had to adjust.
"But Mut, you asshole, they played on the day Friday after Thanksgiving?"
Yeah, an afternoon game, before 6 PM.
How did they get around the law this time? By moving the traditional home opener for the Super Bowl winner to Wednesday, and playing this game on Thursday…which was really Friday morning in Australia.
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Oh, and by the way, the Wednesday night game in Seattle sucked too.
Rams / 49ers is one of the best divisional rivalries we have. It's an important matchup between two teams that you could easily see in the NFC Title game.
And they shipped it off to Australia in a money-grab that turned it into some dumb sleep experiment.
The Rams were lauded as geniuses by the Warren Sharps and Kevin O'Connors of the world for flying out the day before the game. It looked like they needed a lot more sleep, the way they played Thursday night, er, Friday morning. Their lone highlight might have been mocking the long flight and trip.
Goodell and the NFL are OBSESSED with these International Games. The 2026 NFL International Series (yuck) features a record-breaking nine games played across seven countries and four continents. To make this one happen, they forced two of their marquee teams to fly over 30 hours round trip to play a game at 10 AM. That's 14 hours ahead of the Eastern Time Zone and 17 (!!!) hours ahead of the team's local time zone. Insane.
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I mean, Roger Goodell basically stole Raheem Morris' 50th birthday. What a jerk.
Rams / 49ers is a game that should be played in front of the season-ticket-holder fans of those teams. Those fans invest time and money into the NFL and watched one of the biggest games on the schedule get played at a cricket stadium thousands of miles away. Dumb.
The Rams are the favorites to win the Super Bowl and actually HOST this year's event. They looked terrible last night. I'm sure they'll figure it out, but what if this loss and trip derail their season? What if they point to the disaster of flying to Australia the day before a big NFC West game as the reason they don't make the playoffs or something?
At least Melbourne showed out. And the Netflix production was very good. Maybe your fantasy players and bets all did well. Congrats!
But the game itself? It sucked. And it sucks that the NFL has decided to take some of their best games and export them all over the world - at almost any cost - in an effort to make themselves (and the NFL owners) more money.