SCOTT JACOBS

Get excited Europe, and planet Earth!  The Patriots will be stopping in London next season.

The much hyped London game should be the most intriguing Euopean game yet, staging a most likely healthy and recharged Tom Brady versus a stout Bucs team.  It probably won’t match the points that came with this year’s London shootout, a 37-32 Saints win over the San Diego ‘not so super’ Chargers, but it will nevertheless be an exciting contrast of styles.

London has sold out the past two games at Wembley, getting 83,000 excited fans to pack the building, and many more to sign on waiting lists.  I got blasted back ion October when I bluntly stated that the London experiment was a waste.  Needless to say I was proven wrong.  European football fans are passionate and truly dedicated.  Some fly 6,000 miles, others would pay $6,000.  And for that I commend them.  I find it interesting that all three teams that have been picked for the London game have been from the Southeast United States.  Miami, New Orleans, and now Tampa Bay.  Just interesting I suppose.

But next year’s European tilt should be a good game.  Then again, in the ever-changing NFL landscape where you can beat a 10-0 team on the road one minute, and then lost to a .500 team at home the next, who the heck knows.  But I know one thing is for certain.  London will look forward to this game, and I will never again, bash the European experiment.

For the record, the NFL plans to stage a fourth game in London in 2010.

SCOTT JACOBS

Sometimes the numbers do lie.

The Saints-Chargers are set to play the NFL’s Euopean pet project 2.0 for 2008 this weekend at Wembley Stadium in London. 90,000 people are expected for a game between a pair of two disappointing but high scoring teams. But just because people are filling the seats, doesn’t mean people care.

Look around. Search the internet. Google it if you want. I can’t find anything from a London source published recently on the much hyped (yeah, whatever) Bolts-’Aints game. Much hyped maybe in America. Maybe. The game has gone so far under the radar due to the tired realization that this experiment has already gotten old, that I just remembered they were playing the game this week.

San Francisco and Arizona played a very successful game in Mexico City a few years back, and over 100,000 people showed up. That game worked, because it was played on Sunday Night! If you’re going to go big, go all the way. Sticking the game within the confines of the NFL’s afternoon slate of games is boring, and it loses it’s luster.

They did this last year too. The Giants and Dolphins played a horrible 13-10 slop-fest in rainy conditions on Wembley’s sloshy field, and it was painful to watch. The crowd on tv sounded like they had no idea what was going on. “Did he score a goal one lad probably asked another?” “No the other replied, I think he got a red card.”

But this isn’t about making fun of London ‘football’ fans. This is about exposing the fact that there is no buzz about this game. None. Seriously. I searched online for a while and came up with nothing recent. It’s as if the game isn’t even being played. Maybe it’s just a figment of our imagination and the NFL’s sly marketing. Or maybe, the NFL is sticking a sport down people’s throats in a country where they just don’t care that much.

But hey, why stop at one game a year. Back in March there were reports that the NFL might give Britain four game a year. Heck, why not just outsource every game to a different area. We could play games in Turkey, Mongolia, Paris, Berlin, and uh, maybe Antartica has an open date too. While they’re at it, let’s just rename the Super Bowl the World Bowl. And then people will stop calling it American football. They can call it World Foot Ball.

I’m not against experimenting with globalizing the game. But when major London newspapers don’t say a peep about your game, and there is nothing online, can you really look me in the eyes honestly and proclaim, ‘London is truly into this?’

This is such a gimmick.

Enjoy it, because the NFL is doing this in London until at least 2010.

UPDATE: From Mitchell:

This is what some England residents had to say about the NFL’s first game in London:

This is all just crap marketing nonsense. I do recall that the NFL have already tried to impose this body-armoured, steroid-fuelled, waste-of-three-hours-even-though-it’s supposed-to-take-one pointless sport on Europe and got precisely nowhere. And the reason? People here watch sport to see people compete, not to see cheerleaders and $15m running backs do little celebration dances because ‘they are the man’ and certainly not to see drugged up thirty stone idiots shoving each other for three seconds at a time. This will have the same impact NFL Europe had.

Seems they really are embracing us.

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