Americans always seem to want more pro football. Yet it's the folks abroad who might be getting an extra taste of the NFL in the future.
Although talks are extremely preliminary, the NFL is investigating adding a 17th regular-season game and playing it outside the United States. The extra game would take the place of one in the preseason, allowing every team to play once abroad without sacrificing a home match.
Is there enough of an international market for the NFL that they can afford to play 16 whole games outside of the U.S. each season? I can think of Toronto, Mexico City, Beijing, Tokyo, London and really that's about it as far as cities that would 'really' take to American football.
If the NFL was smart, they'd pick one of these 'neutral site' games per year in Los Angeles to get that TV market back.
The question I have is how will they alter the contracts and salary cap to compensate for an extra paycheck for all the players? I don't believe they get paid the same for preseason games.
Not a hard issue to fix, but something that will have to be taken into account.
I would love to see the NFL's top team face off against the CFL's top team in a pair of exhibition matches, each using the host team's specialized rules.
The biggest problem would be WHEN to play...as our seasons run at different times.
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Originally posted by OliverI would love to see the NFL's top team face off against the CFL's top team in a pair of exhibition matches, each using the host team's specialized rules.
You probably wouldn't want to see that at all. I'm not sure you'd even want to see the worst team in the NFL against the best team in the CFL.
Although many of the athletes in the CFL are guys who might have had a shot at making the NFL, the general rule is, if a guy is good enough to make the NFL, you won't find him in the CFL.
Occasionally circumstance might lead a player like Doug Flutie (small), Warren Moon (black), Rocket Ismail (money) or Ricky Williams (drugs) to the Canadian league, but usually only for a year or two and those are certainly the exception. But in general, the guys in the CFL, gifted athletes though they may be, are not NFL-calibre in one sense or another.
So first of all, you've got a gap in size, strength, and skill.
Next, any NFL team's resources are orders of magnitude greater than their CFL counterparts. Figure that for every staff member on a CFL team, there's three on an NFL team. The roster of any given NFL team is also much larger. It's like the difference between an Indy Racing League team ($1million/yr. to run) and a Formula One team ($100million/yr. to run): you can't even begin to draw a comparison.
The least significant bit is the rule, field, and equipment changes. 75% or more of the CFL players grew up playing NFL rules anyway. Meanwhile, the NFL players are good enough athletes that they probably wouldn't find much challenge in adapting to them.
But once you factor in the differences in the players, the differences in the resources, etc., you'd best be having the CFL-rules game first, because the best team in the CFL is at their very best going to be embarrassed in the NFL-rules game and at worst, utterly decimated by injuries. The CFL-rules game might be interesting for the first quarter. After that, it gets ugly.
I think you might get better competition out of a CFL team vs. Arena Football team matchup, no offense to Canada. It's like hockey, only I presume most of your players come from "Down South", right?
Originally posted by Big BadIs there enough of an international market for the NFL that they can afford to play 16 whole games outside of the U.S. each season? I can think of Toronto, Mexico City, Beijing, Tokyo, London and really that's about it as far as cities that would 'really' take to American football.
You can add a number of German cities to that list. They are (American) football mad over there. Five out of the six current NFL Europa teams are from Germany, which I think proves that the market over there is still really strong. Also Frankfurt was apparently runner-up to London in the race to host the 2007 Overseas Game.
Sixteen games is quite enough with the play offs. They could actually over saturate the market if not careful. Or at the very least demean the regular season.
And yes, we have friends from Europe and they are fascinated with American football.
I doubt it would ever happen, but I would love for the NFL to dump the preseason and go to a 20 game regular season.
Basically, add another 4 games against teams in a conference in the teams conference. So every team will pay against 12 of the other teams in their conference once. The one game against a team based on last years record has to be from a div they're not currently playing.
Example: Skins play in the NFC East, will play the North and South in a year, their 19th and 20th games will be against teams based on record, so they will play against a team from the NFC West for one of those games.
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