Two NFL teams flew 8,000 miles and tried to fool the body clockThe Los Angeles Rams Are Trying to Defeat Time

The NFL played its first regular-season game in Australia. The San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams flew roughly 8,000 miles from California and took opposite approaches to the time change.

Arrive a week early, or stay a day

The 49ers flew to Melbourne nine days ahead, trained, watched some Aussie rules football and won over most of the local crowd. Experts recommend one day of recovery per time zone crossed, and Melbourne runs 17 hours ahead of California — seven hours behind, as the body clock reckons it — so they simply got there early.

The Rams landed yesterday, 24 hours before kickoff. Their bet is that they will be in Australia so briefly their bodies will not notice the shift.

The body clock does show up in the score

Inflammation-fighting compounds peak at night, while muscle strength and coordination are best in the afternoon. A study of every late NFL game from 1970 to 2011 found West Coast teams beat the oddsmakers' expectations in two out of three games. Coaches travelling west also gamble more on fourth down in evening games.

Many teams now employ a sleep specialist, and 14 of them, the 49ers included, have installed daylight-mimicking lighting at their training facilities. Players even get personal sleep guidelines for the flight.

Which gamble is smarter

Jamie Zeitzer, a circadian physiologist at Stanford, calls the Rams' plan high risk, high reward: if they really feel like they are playing in the afternoon, they gain a small edge. But he still thinks they picked the worse strategy, because getting grown adults to sleep on cue in a 24-hour window is close to impossible.

The Rams arrived a day before a game in London last year and won anyway. Tom Clark, who advises NFL teams, puts it plainly: the better team wins even if it is playing on the moon — and the Rams are this year's Super Bowl favourites.