For the second time this year, the 49ers have a pair of back-to-back games that start at 1:00 p.m. ET. For the second time this year, the 49ers spent the week between those games away from home.
After Week One at Tampa, they stayed in Ohio before beating the Bengals in Cincinnati. After Week Thirteen at Baltimore, they detoured to Florida before Sunday’s game at New Orleans.
After the Week Two win over the Bengals, coach Kyle Shanahan told PFT that he didn’t believe in the importance of keeping players’ bodies adjusted to a different time zone until he became the coach of a West Coast team, when he realized what a “huge difference” it makes.
“It hurts the team to be away from routine and family,” Shanahan said at the time, but he explained that, when traveling back and forth across the country, “guys are dead no matter what we try to do.”
They were very much alive in Week Two, but the opponent was one of the worst teams in the league. They’ll need to be more than alive in the Superdome on Sunday in order to recover from last week’s loss and commence the process of reclaiming the No. 1 seed by beating the Saints and hoping that the Seahawks lose to the Rams.