NFL Grind, With International Flair

The Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy starter kit, otherwise known as the NFL regular season, fast approaches, so let’s visit The Shield’s efforts to simultaneously grow the game and to protect the disposable bipeds, excuse me, the valued human beings that fuel the American sports colossus. 

Commish Roger Goodell recently told a German media outlet that “at some point there will be NFL teams outside the USA. I have no doubt that this will happen one day.” The NFL has played international games for decades and will continue this season with nine games outside the border, beginning with L.A. Rams-San Francisco on Sept. 10 in Melbourne, Australia. Three games are scheduled for London, and there will be games in Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Madrid, Munich and Mexico City. 

Now, when Goodell says “outside the USA,” he doesn’t mean Mexico City and Montreal, he’s thinking Europe. He previously said that he believes London can be home to two franchises. Indeed, the city has hosted 42 games since 2007. The games have been well-received, with last year’s Rams-Jacksonville Jaguars game at Wembley Stadium drawing 86,000 fans and two games at Tottenham Hotspur’s comparatively smaller joint attracting more than 61,000. 

There are beaucoup issues with planting an NFL team flag across the pond. Start with the two biggest questions: Where would they play? And why would one assume that civic interest in occasional NFL games means that it’s sustainable over entire seasons and many years, particularly in places with no historical ties to American football? The NFL stages international games in big soccer stadiums, borrowing the facilities when they aren’t being used or when the home club is on the road. That arrangement is untenable for an entire season, so any transplanted or expansion NFL franchise will need, and probably demand, a dedicated stadium and training facility. 

NFL owners’ practice of extorting sweetheart deals that benefit them is unlikely to go over well on foreign soil (“We’re on the hook for how much? For a stadium that’ll be used nine or ten times a year? Sounds like bollocks to me, mate.”). Logistics concerns are real for a potential foreign franchise. Could a team based outside the U.S. retain players or attract free agents? What about the tax structure overseas? How would that impact player salaries and compensation? Flights across the Atlantic become onerous. There’s a five-hour time difference between London and the East Coast, eight hours – a full sleep cycle – between the U.K. and the West Coast. That kind of regular disruption would be an extra stressor to players and certainly affect performance. 

Speaking of added stress, all this talk of international franchises comes on the heels of adding a 17th game, with an 18th game all but assured within the next few years and little more than lip service about the effects on players’ health. Goodell and NFL brass routinely yammer about how player safety is a top priority, but their actions often say otherwise. Yes, the league now penalizes targeting and headhunting and has outlawed certain kinds of blocks deemed dangerous. Kickoffs have been tweaked and re-tweaked to reduce the battering-ram collisions on those plays. Concussions and head trauma are now taken more seriously, but remember that the league had to be dragged into that position after denying a connection between the game’s violence and brain issues for years. It took some high-profile deaths and diagnoses, along with dogged individual medical researchers, to finally get the league to acknowledge the problem. 

Rest and recovery are vital for player health, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the schedule. Twenty-four of the 32 teams have at least one stretch where they play two games within four or five days. Twenty-two teams have at least one stretch where they’ll play three games in 12 days. Eleven teams have multiple stretches in which they play 3-in-12. Denver and Green Bay have three stretches in which they play three games in 12 days, while Chicago has two 3-in-12 stretches and one in which it plays three games in 13 days. A slew of games at the end of the season are designated as TBA for dates and times, owing to attractive matchups and potential playoff bearings, but that will also affect recovery and quality of play. It all but guarantees that injuries will have an outsized impact and that many teams won’t play close to their best at the end of the season. 

One logical fix is to lengthen the season, not to add more games but more byes and off time and to get closer to the one-game-per-week routine that would give players a fighting chance to stay healthy or to recover and contribute. But instead, we get the inevitable march toward 18 games, Patriots owner Robert Kraft floating the idea of 16 international games per year with every team participating and the accompanying flights and disruption, and a schedule that puts greater emphasis on exposure and not player health and safety. Wager accordingly.