49ers vs Rams in Melbourne: Are George Kittle and Nick Bosa Playing in the Netflix Opener?
The NFL is playing a regular season game in Australia for the first time, and it picked a good one. The San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams kick off Thursday at 8:35 p.m. ET from the Melbourne Cricket Ground, streaming on Netflix. Local time in Melbourne is Friday morning, which is its own kind of weird.
The bigger question for 49ers fans is simpler. Who is actually going to be out there?
Start with the good news, because there is some. Neither George Kittle nor Nick Bosa carries an injury designation on San Francisco’s final report. Both are expected to play. That is a real win for a team that spent the last calendar year in the training room.
Kittle tore his Achilles in the wild card round of last season’s playoffs. That was January. He is set to be on the field roughly eight months later, which is fast for that injury at any age, let alone for a tight end whose entire game is built on blocking down on defensive ends and turning short catches into collisions. Kyle Shanahan has said the team will be smart with him, and you should read that as a snap count. Expect Kittle to be involved, not to play 60 snaps.
Bosa’s road was longer and messier. He tore his ACL in Week 3 of 2025, and the recovery has not been clean. He missed a big chunk of the summer with lingering issues in the same knee. He is cleared for Thursday, which is the outcome San Francisco needed, but the version of Bosa that shows up in Melbourne may not be the one who was ripping through left tackles two years ago. That takes time.
Ricky Pearsall is the one with no ambiguity. He is done for the year. Pearsall had knee surgery on August 1 for a PCL injury and went on injured reserve the same day, before the season even started. That is a brutal loss for a young receiver who was supposed to take a step forward and for a passing game that needed another perimeter option.
So the 49ers open the season with a tight end coming off an Achilles, a pass rusher coming off an ACL and a knee that keeps flaring up, and their receiver room already down a body. Brock Purdy and Christian McCaffrey are healthy, which counts for a lot, but the margin here is thin.
Now look across the field, because the Rams did not show up shorthanded.
Matthew Stafford is coming off a 2025 season where he threw for 4,707 yards and 46 touchdowns. Los Angeles averaged 30.5 points per game, best in the NFL. Puka Nacua and Davante Adams are both back. That is the same offense that scored on everybody last year, returning basically intact.
And then the Rams went and added Myles Garrett to a defense that was already good. Pairing Garrett with what Los Angeles already had on that front is the kind of move that decides division races. San Francisco’s offensive line will find out early.
Here is the honest take: the 49ers are the more talented roster on paper when everyone is upright, and they are almost never everyone upright. The Rams have continuity, health and the best quarterback in the building. That is a hard combination to beat in Week 1 after a 20-hour flight.
The travel is not nothing, either. Both teams made the same trip, so it washes out competitively, but neither offense should be expected to look crisp. Give the edge to the team that needs fewer things to go right, and that is Los Angeles.
What San Francisco should want out of Thursday is not just a win. It is Kittle and Bosa getting through 30-something snaps each and boarding the plane home without a setback. This season runs through their availability, and Week 1 in Australia is the first real test of whether the medical staff got it right.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
