This means nothing in the larger scheme of things, but I can’t help but talk about it.
Last week the NFL announced that next season’s annual London game, the first of potentially two in England, will be the Denver Broncos versus the San Francisco 49ers, played in Wembley Stadium Halloween Day. It’s the fourth consecutive year that a regular-season game is being held in the country America rebelled from. In order, the previous four games were: Miami versus the New York Giants; San Diego versus New Orleans; and New England versus Tampa Bay.
What do these four games have in common? It pits an AFC team against an NFC team. And for some ridiculously fastidious reason, that bugs me.
With the way the schedules are now, one team plays another team from the other conference once every four years, barring a potential matchup in the Super Bowl. That means that that team hosts that inter-conference foe once every eight years. But this setup, with the consent of the home teams (which in chronological order are the Dolphins, Saints, Buccaneers and, next year, the 49ers), means there won’t be a matchup of one team at another team in the city they actually represent for 16 years.
Guess it’s not a big deal. A cursory scan of the WWW doesn’t show that there’s a Chargers fan club of New Orleans or a Broncos fan club of the Bay Area. But, you know, still. Baseball might be the only other national sports league where its fans have significant knowledge of all the other teams in the league. Gambling, including fantasy football, helps a lot towards that recognition. And so, even though Niners fans might only have recognized Brandon Marshall, and even though their only connection to the road team is that they have the San Francisco Defense in Week 10 of the next season, it’s good for fan relations to give all its paying customers the opportunity to see every single franchise in the NFL more frequently than once a generation. Now, barring expansion and/or relocation, 49ers fans won’t be able to see the Denver Broncos, whether or not it whets their appetite, until 2026 at the earliest.
So what to do? I don’t like that the league is sending two teams overseas to play a game that counts because of the jetlag (and don’t get me started on expanding to England; unless the NFL stumbles on some Avatar technology it’s ridiculously unfair to make players compete on two continents, as well as be blue and wear only loincloth). But if they must do this to propagate the brand overseas, give them a game fans here will also get to see some time before they die. Division games are out; the eight stars on the logo they revamped two years ago shows the importance the NFL places on rivalry games, and you can’t take Bears-Packers out of Lambeau even for one year without starting a riot.
That leaves those intra-conference games. Teams from one NFC division automatically play teams in another NFC division in a three-year rotation, and each team plays at the other’s stadium once every six years, guaranteed. That’s close enough. Not only is a dozen years tolerable, but there’s also those two “intra-conference by position” games – where, say, an AFC team plays the other two AFC teams that finished in the same spot in their divisions as it did in its division, meaning there’s a chance that gap between hosting a team could be less than twelve years. Yeah, so give Londoners and expatriates that.
Am I the only one who cares about this?