I was hoping to have some pictures ready for this post. However, as I'm still having some hard drive issues, I haven't downloaded them yet from my phone. I'll do it later this week, and do a little review sometime.
So where do we go to from here?
Rumour has it that there are going to be two games in London next year. Seemingly, the experiment of playing games here are a success. What the NFL wants to find is the saturation point of support. Would you have two sellouts, or would people pick and choose?
The interesting thing is to find out how long would there be between games, and how many people would go to both? The plan will probably be to have the games a month apart. If they do go this route, getting the matchups right will be key.
We've been fortunate so far, that each of the matchups have had at least one team popular in the UK playing. Now, that hasn't mattered much as people, no matter who they supported, just wanted to experience the game. Now give us a choice, and things could turn.
Conference matchups are all well and good, but if we do go down this route it might be interesting to have two intraconference matchups. We'd never get a divisional game (for good reason), but a conference matchup would be nice.
One thing I have read is the idea of having one team being the host (like Buffalo playing games in Toronto), in the hopes of building a fan base for that team. At the moment, a number of teams are having problems selling out their games. Getting one of those to give up a home date shouldn't be too difficult. But in the long term?
The long term hope for quite a few fans, is a London based NFL franchise. However, I don't think that it's going to happen for a long time. The distances involved ae just too great. As was pointed out when David Beckham first signed by Los Angeles, the jet lag involved would be too great.
I think the best we can hope for is two or three games a season, played as part of a international round of matches. They are talking about dropping a pre season game and having a 17th game in the regular season. A slate of neutral field games, at this point would make sense.
The NFL is trying quite hard to market the game. The obvious example is the NFLUK show on a Saturday morning. It's funny, but they seem to be marketing it straight at the under 25s, by trying to make it both hip and happening. They're trying to make it the NBA mark two, as opposed to letting the action speak for itself.
The program does do some things right, such as the know the game segment. As for the rest, it just isn't my cup of tea. The presenters are shocking, but I guess it isn't aimed at me. Now how about a hour long highlights show, you know, with highlights. Trust me on this one, if you show people the game they will become fans.
The thing is, the people that they're marketing to, aren't going to be able to afford the ticket prices to go to the games. If you look at the majority of people who went to Sunday's game, they weren't the people they are marketing to.
As I'm slightly ranting already, two other things:
1) Someone needs to find a way of making it easy to get a decent amount of NFL merchandice available in the UK. Or even have a way of buying with ease to the UK through the NFL Shop website. If you make it easy for us to buy things, we might buy more stuff.
2) Something needs to be done with the TV coverage. Yes there may be more live games coming our way. But we seem to be having less games on TV. Sky have halved the games they show, and no MNF. We already know that Five won't be showing anything next season. It would be embarrasing if after all of the marketing of the game over here that the game coverage becomes difficult to get a hold of.
Oh, one last thing. Remind me never to mention the phrase "trap game" ever again. I picked Oakland to shock the Jets. Guess what? They lost by 38 points. Yes, I put the pun in pundit.
Bye for now