How far can the NFL go in London?

Last of what eventually did wind up being three in my series about going to England. You can see the first one here and the second one here.

There was an NFL game while I was in London. The Vikings beat the Steelers. Mrs. Last Honest and I are pretty sure we saw Wembley Stadium during the game on our way back from Liverpool.

But had it not been for all the Steelers jerseys we saw in London in the days before the game (there were also Vikings jerseys, but black and gold appeared to outnumber purple about 10-1 based on what we saw), we might not have known the game was even going on.

Perhaps that was a function of not reading a ton of newspapers or watching a lot of TV during that time, and the TV in our hotel didn't even have sports channels (the only soccer game I saw was the Champions League match between Manchester City and Bayern Munich ... in German), but coming from a place where preseason games get endless intense coverage, it didn't seem like there was a lot of hype for the game, even though it did pull in more than 83,000 fans.

We weren't exactly on the outskirts of town, either. We were a short train ride from, and spent a lot of time walking through, both Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, and the only signs we saw of the game were a couple banners one night.

Jacksonville and San Francisco are in London this weekend, and, as an example, the sports page on The Guardian's website as of this writing (Oct. 24 at just after 3 p.m., or 8 p.m. London time) has one NFL story, about the Dallas Cowboys playing in London next year as one of three NFL games in Wembley. The U.S. sport site is, as might be expected, dominated by the World Series, with the two NFL stories on the main page being the announcement of next year's games and how horrible Florida's NFL teams are.

Yet there is talk about an NFL franchise in London, or even a Super Bowl, to which I say, "Fat chance," for various reasons.

1. Getting beyond the inroads already made -- Even the SI piece linked above states that the fan base is not quite there for an NFL team.

"The 'core fan base' in the U.K. is now more than 2 million, according to Chris Parsons, the NFL's senior vice president of international.
That's more than double the figure when the league first brought regular-season games to Wembley in 2007, but still not high enough for a franchise here to be sustainable.
'We've doubled our fan base in the last 3 1-2 to four years," Parsons said. "I'd like to see that at least double again in the next three or four years. That would put us among the top five sports in the U.K. in terms of core fan base.'"

Four million fans sounds like a lot, but if that's over the entire United Kingdom, is it enough to fill a stadium the size of Wembley eight times a year? It will be interesting to see what the attendance figures are as the NFL adds games. Before anyone talks about ramping up to a full schedule, let's see what happens when it's not a once-a-year thing.

Not to mention that a full-scale commitment to the NFL in London -- most likely with an expansion team or a terrible NFL team like the Jaguars (whose owner, Shahid Khan, also owns the Fulham soccer team) -- would require taking on soccer, a sport that may be even more entrenched in the English landscape than the NFL is here. Granted, the lack of anything similar to Major League Baseball, the NBA or NHL in England (more on that later) may give the NFL a vacuum to slip into, but would being a likely distant No. 2 be enough?

2. Playing logistics -- This Kyle Baker blog post pretty much spells out the logistical problems of having an NFL team in London, namely that it's a long way from every other team. I made the flight from Logan to Heathrow, which presumably would be the flight involved for any New England-London game, and while the planes any NFL team would take are certainly much nicer than the very nice British Airways plane I flew, it's still a haul, and I didn't have to play a football game after landing.

And that's the shortest flight.

To make London work, you would almost have to put two teams there, like the Dodgers and Giants did when they moved, so any road team playing there would at least have two games before flying back, but that would still require setting up shop in London for more than a week and finding practice facilities and arranging the schedules so that one London team was always home while the other was on the road and that they played the same opponents (and each other), etc. etc.

It would be really hard. Let's put it that way.

3. Getting people to watch -- When you live in the eastern United States, you don't realize the time implications of traveling east unless you actually go to a city like London, which is five hours ahead.

If I lived in London, the only baseball games I would be able to watch, presumably online if my computer magically allowed me to do that, would be games that start at 1 p.m. in whatever U.S. time zone the game is being played (or the 4 p.m. Fox game on Saturdays), as that would be anywhere from 6 to 9 p.m. London time. American night games, which make up the majority of the schedule? Forget it. Even on the nights I'm inspired to stay awake, a midnight start in London (7 p.m. in the eastern United States), might get you an inning or two.

And the playoffs and World Series? Americans can't stay up to watch. What do you think Brits do?

I would imagine the time difference is a major reason why it would be tough for an American sport to fully catch on in England, although the NFL, with its 1 and 4 p.m. start times on Sundays, would have the best chance. However, I don't think NBC would appreciate "Sunday Night Football" airing at 1 a.m. in London, and it would be nearly impossible to have a Sunday night or Monday night ESPN game in London, no matter how good the team is, because it wouldn't fit a prime-time schedule.

And that brings us to the Super Bowl. As the video in this post notes, London would be an awesome place to hold a Super Bowl. Having been to both New Orleans and London in recent years, London may not be quite as much fun for the Super Bowl traveling circus, especially given the weather in late January or early February, but it wouldn't be far behind.

Except the game would have to start after 11 p.m. local time (which players, fans and media at the game would just love, I say sarcastically) or early afternoon Eastern time in the United States (say goodbye millions upon millions in ad revenue).

In the video linked above, Don Banks of Sports Illustrated suggests playing the Pro Bowl in London before the Super Bowl, which actually would likely serve two purposes if the NFL tried it -- killing the Pro Bowl once and for all and killing the NFL in London.