Kurtenbach: The 49ers exposed the sleepy Rams’ hubris in brutal Melbourne thrashing

Hubris is an expensive item to drag across the world, and the Los Angeles Rams just paid the massive overweight baggage fee.

Before a ball was kicked inside the Melbourne Cricket Ground Thursday night stateside and Friday morning in Australia, Sean McVay and the Rams decided to fight human biology. The 49ers delivered the comeuppance going (way) away.

The 49ers beat the Rams 27-7 in Thursday night’s 2026 season opener, but that doesn’t quite capture the beatdown.

San Francisco didn’t just win a football game in this environment Kyle Shanahan called gladiatorial. No, the 49ers turned the prohibitive Super Bowl favorites into sleepy, wandering props in an expensive piece of performance art for the league.

The Niners are 1-0 to start the season. So are circadian rhythms.

The 49ers landed Down Under a week early, swallowed the brutal 16-hour flight and 17-hour time shift, practiced, met the locals and adjusted their body clocks like professionals.

The Rams? They sent a few clipboard-toting interns ahead, convinced themselves staying on Pacific Time was visionary science and touched down in Victoria roughly 29 hours before kickoff.

That isn’t cutting-edge logistics. That’s arriving at a heavyweight title fight straight off an all-nighter.

When the Rams wake up back in Southern California, will they even remember this fever dream? Or will their minds simply block out four quarters of 49ers domination?

Don’t write this off as purely jet lag over jet motion, though. That lets off McVay’s adenosine-soaked brain trust way too easily.

The NFL is playing games in foreign lands because they’re trying to expand the league’s reach. The Niners understood the assignment and put on a football clinic for the fine Aussies.

It was cohesive, it was nasty and it looked totally sustainable stateside.

The offense was built on power runs and screen passes — simple but effective. Christian McCaffrey wasn’t used as an every-down battering ram — a safety blanket for Shanahan — but rather as just another cog in the offensive machine (which, of course, he’s not), carrying the ball only 10 times to rookie Kaelon Black’s 14 totes, but making each of them count, going for 6.8 yards on average.

Brock Purdy didn’t look like a guy playing on upside-down turf. No, he operated with MVP-grade clarity, dealing clinical strikes left, right, center and hitting the Rams over the top when they felt a bit greedy.

Mike Evans looked every bit like the big-bodied, dominating X receiver this franchise has craved since Brandon Aiyuk’s 2023 peak. Actually, he looked better.

Up front, San Francisco’s offensive line simply redrew the line of scrimmage. Kyle Juszczyk hammered daylight between the tackles like a bulldozer, surely reminding the Australian fans of legendary Wallabies prop James Slipper.

Deebo Samuel brought a spark with a vintage kick return and a receiving touchdown. He jumped in on the blocking, too, springing big runs in the process.

George Kittle, while not fully his ferocious self yet following that January Achilles injury, was steady and threatening when he was on the field.

Fred Warner looked like the single best defensive player on Earth. After missing the back half of last season, he swarmed sideline to sideline like he’d been shot out of a cannon, punching out balls with pinpoint precision and winning every one-on-one battle he saw.

Nick Bosa, fresh off his third ACL reconstruction, battered the edge with unhindered speed and power. Next to him, offseason addition Osa Odighizuwa racked up four quarterback hits from defensive tackle and lived in the backfield rent-free.

And behind them, new defensive coordinator Raheem Morris unleashed an abrasive, funky dime package that completely scrambled Stafford’s processing abilities on critical downs. (Whatever processing abilities made it to the Southern Hemisphere, that is.) It was a tactical checkmate pregame and on both sides during the game.

It became so bleak that McVay pulled Stafford, the reigning MVP, late in the fourth quarter. It wasn’t an injury; it was mercy.

Oh, and did you see Myles Garrett? Where was the Rams’ ultimate trump card? Every time I checked, he was breathing heavily on the sidelines.

It all comes back to one truth: One team came to play. One team just showed up and thought they would win anyway.

The Rams might end up being the best team in the NFL at the end of this season, but they looked like the kind of lower-level team Ohio State schedules for an early-season feel-good win on Thursday. Or was it Friday? Was it any day at all for the Rams?

Of course there will be countless overreactions, in both directions, to the Week 1 game. The Rams will be called frauds, the Niners will be anointed “back.” And, again, those things might prove to be true. But Thursday/Friday was a truly strange experiment — one that is difficult to properly gauge. Take it all with a copious amount of salt (and a Coopers, if you have one available).

All that said, wouldn’t you rather be the Niners right now?

The flight back to California is just about as long for both teams, and one of those flights is going to be a hell of a lot more joyful.

The Rams might argue that they won’t deal with time zone confusion on the way back — they never adjusted in the first place — but is anyone going to believe their sleep science now? The Niners will deal with jet lag on the way back, sure, but they’re doing it at 1-0 overall and a critical 1-0 in the division, with cozy dates against Miami and Arizona waiting back home. That will make the tough bounce-back all the easier.

In the Australian winter, the 49ers won the battle against sleep and they won the football game.

And come the American winter, that might look like the exact moment the NFC West was won.