San Francisco 49ers might already have a solution to their toughest stretch of the 2024 NFL season
The San Francisco 49ers' bye week in the 2024 season is well-timed. San Francisco will have a bye in Week 9, just as in 2023, the ideal time for the 49ers to potentially make a trade deadline acquisition that could put them over the top in their quest to go one better than last season […]
The San Francisco 49ers' bye week in the 2024 season is well-timed.
San Francisco will have a bye in Week 9, just as in 2023, the ideal time for the 49ers to potentially make a trade deadline acquisition that could put them over the top in their quest to go one better than last season after an agonizing defeat in Super Bowl 58.
But it also precedes the toughest stretch of the 49ers' season.
The 49ers' complete 2024 schedule was revealed on Wednesday, and their stretch run figures to be an especially challenging one.
San Francisco does not play a game east of the Mississippi River in the first eight weeks of the season. The final nine weeks of the season will see the 49ers play four such games, with three of them coming in the first four weeks after their bye.
The 49ers face the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on the road in Week 10, a game that will start at 1:00 p.m. ET (10:00 a.m. PT), with subsequent road games against the Green Bay Packers and Buffalo Bills following a home game with the Seattle Seahawks.
It is a saving grace that the Packers game is a 4:25 p.m. ET start while the contest with the Bills is a primetime matchup on Sunday Night Football, lessening the impact of the time change.
Yet that level of travel in such a short space of time makes that four-game run the toughest stretch of the 49ers' regular season. It's a run that magnifies the importance of the Niners maintaining their recent dominance of the Seahawks at Levi's Stadium and could leave San Francisco searching for a way to find some home comforts on the road.
The solution for the Niners may be to not return home at all following the game with the Packers. The 49ers have stayed on the road in years gone by when they have had successive cross-country trips on the schedule and the location of their encounters with Green Bay and Buffalo may be helpful in that regard.
In 2019, the 49ers stayed in Youngstown, OH, in between road games with the Buccaneers and Cincinnati Bengals to start the season, the franchise having connections in the city as it is the place where owner Jed York was born.
San Francisco won both of those games in a season that ended in a Super Bowl appearance, and the location of Youngstown, a little over 600 miles from Green Bay and under 200 miles from Buffalo, may see York call in another favor so that the 49ers can again use the facilities of Youngstown State to alleviate the negative impacts of an extremely difficult run of games.
Playing three 2023 postseason teams on the road in the space of four weeks is unlikely to be something the 49ers will relish but, in having the potential opportunity to replicate what they did at the start of 2019, they may already have a solution to the biggest challenge they will face in the 2024 regular season.
