International Football…

About 6 weeks ago – whilst the website was dormant – I wrote that I found it strange that Michael Sam was going to be a participant in Dancing With The Stars when he could be working to improve his pass rush and line backing skills. I assume that he still wants to play professional football in the NFL and the normal way one progresses from “practice squad player” to “roster spot player” is by training and working on football skills and football conditioning. Nonetheless, he has decided that Dancing With The Stars is a way station towards whatever his goal may be.

Yesterday, there were reports that the Montreal Alouettes of the CFL were extending an offer to Michael Sam and the GM of the Alouettes indicated that he thought there was a 50/50 chance that Sam would be in uniform in Montreal this year. Sam did go to the NFL Veteran Combine in late March but the reports coming from there did not provide much incentive for NFL teams to line up and bid for his services. Reportedly, he had “more muscle mass” than he did at the College Combine last year; that is a good thing for NFL linebackers. However, his time in the 40-yard dash was slower by 0.2 seconds than it was last year; that is not a good thing for NFL linebackers.

There are historical examples of players going North to play in the CFL and then returning to play well in the NFL. Warren Moon would have to be the poster child for that career arc. There also have been players for whom the Canadian version of pro football is better suited to their skill set than the NFL version. Should Michael Sam choose to “go North” for next year, we may anticipate that he will try again to make an NFL roster and we will have another datum with regard to the success of players moving from one league to the other.

Speaking obliquely of the NFL, the league continues to focus on global expansion of the brand. We already have 3 games in London next year and reports say that ticket sales have been impressive even this far in advance of the games. I saw one “league official” who is involved with the “international expansion efforts” quoted as saying that the objective would be to have a team full-time in London by 2022. Oh, but that is not all…

The Pro Bowl will be going to Brazil in February 2017. There are 200 million folks in Brazil; that is far too large a potential market for the NFL to ignore. After all, the population of Great Britain is only 65 million.

The league reportedly has its eye on Germany as another potential market. Recall that in the days of NFL Europe, there were 5 different teams playing in Germany. In fact, in the last year of NFL Europa (2007), there were 6 teams in the league and only the Amsterdam Admirals played outside of Germany.

The NFL wants to play at least one exhibition game in Mexico – preferably Mexico City – in the near future and preliminary steps to achieve that end are underway.

Most of all, do not forget China. According to reports, an important part of any move into China for the NFL is acquisition of media rights and in particular the league wants to consider digital delivery of the product over the Internet. Note how that desire dovetails with the NFL saying that one of its Thursday Night Games this year will be on a digital platform.

Regarding those 3 London Games this year, the NFL would have liked to put 4 games there this year but the Rugby World Cup will happen this year and made the scheduling impossible. I read one report that said that 40,000 fans have already bought tickets to all three of the games in London and that the NFL sees this as a fan base of potential season-ticket buyers should there be a London team down the road. While millions of words will be written regarding the NFL moving back into LA, there will be less attention paid to international extension of the league. Nevertheless, internationalization is coming and the NFL has plainly made that known to the teams:

Any team that relocates within the US must give up one home game in each of their “transitional years” to play in London – or potentially elsewhere overseas. The “transitional years” are the seasons between the announcement of the relocation and the actual move into the new stadium in the new city. Considering that 3 teams are reportedly interested in moving to LA, that makes a few teams eligible for playing in London in future years.

Any team that gets a Super Bowl game in its stadium will have to give up a home game to a London/international venue during a 5-year window as part of the deal.

In 2015, the NFL will have back-to-back games in London for the first time and supposedly plans to put a December game in London in 2016. [The “December game” is still in the planning stage, but several people say it is highly likely.]

As I said above, millions of words will be written about the NFL efforts to move back to LA but here are a couple of things that you will have to go looking for:

If the NFL does not like empty seats in its stadia that stand out like a sore thumb on its telecasts, LA might not be the best destination for a team. Folks there notoriously arrive late for games and leave early. And, even though there are about 16 million folks in the Greater LA area, the Rams and the Raiders rarely sold out their games when they were there.

I have said many times that Washington sports fans are front-running bandwagoners who will abandon a losing team as fast as a prom dress can hit the floor. Well, so too are LA fans. Check out attendance figures and trends for teams that are winners and ones that are losers. Oh, and compare attendance for the same team in winning years and losing years…

Finally, here is an observation from Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times:

“Baltimore Ravens behemoth John Urschel co-wrote a paper, published in the Journal of Computational Mathematics, titled ‘A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians.’

“And to think, some of his O-line brethren can’t even remember the snap count.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………