Tonight’s NFL game between the Arizona Cardinals and the San Francisco 49ers in Mexico City wraps up the league’s international schedule for this season, the league’s 15th season in the past 16 playing on foreign soil.
All 15 of those seasons have included games in London, with this season’s three bringing the total to 33. Tonight’s contest will be the fourth south of the border (not counting one that was canceled due to poor field conditions), all at Estadio Azteca.
The fifth game this season was in Munich, Germany — Tampa Bay’s win last week over Seattle. That was the NFL’s first foray into the country, but the visit was so successful that it won’t be the last, the league announcing there will be a game in Germany each of the next three seasons.
Football has become America’s sport, and its popularity is slowly spreading beyond our borders — too slowly, in my opinion. And not because I care about how much money 31 of the richest people in America (plus the publicly owned Packers) make.
One downside of the overseas games has been that it costs a team a home game. Considering that data shows that from 1989 to 2021 the home team won nearly 60% of the time. If losing that homefield advantage costs a team a win in a given season, that could mean losing a playoff spot, a division title or homefield advantage in the playoffs.
That it would cost a team a home game was unavoidable when the NFL used a 16-game schedule, but expanding the slate to 17 games last season gave the league the opportunity to rectify this inequity. With a 17-game schedule, it became a given that half the teams would have eight home games and half would have nine. The solution the NFL came up with was actually pretty solid.
The 16-game schedule broke down as follows:
>> Home-and-home games against three division opponents for six games
>> Games against all four teams from one other division in the same conference, rotating on a three-year basis
>> A game each against the teams that finished the previous season in the same place in the standings from the other two divisions in the same conference
>> Games against all four teams from one division in the opposite conference, rotating on a four-year basis.
When the players agreed to a 17th game, I wondered how the league would select the opponent. The 16-game schedule was so perfect. The NFL’s solution was ingenious: taking the team in the same position in the standings from the previous season from the division in the opposite conference that the team’s division is two years from in either direction.
If that’s a tad confusing, allow me to explain with an example.
The Kansas City Chiefs this year drew the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as their 17th opponent. They both finished first in their division last season and their divisions last faced off in 2020 and are next scheduled to meet in 2024.
That formula extends the strength-of-schedule element and pits teams against each other that might go a long time without playing. One conference hosts all 17th games each year, which at least means teams competing against each other for playoff position are on equal footing.
Well, other than those overseas games. This year, the Saints, Packers, Jaguars, Bucs and Cardinals lose home games, meaning they have one fewer than other teams in their conference. Four of those teams are far from the playoff picture now, but Tampa Bay is up by half a game in the NFC South. That lost home game could cost it a playoff spot.
Adding the 17th game to the schedule gave the league the perfect opportunity to solve this problem. Instead of giving additional home games to one conference, the NFL could have put those 17th games on neutral fields.
That’s where the international series comes in. The league would need to find 16 neutral sites to host the games, and foreign fields could provide the bulk of those.:
>> London has done very well hosting as many as four games in a season.
>> Germany had five teams in the World League/NFL Europe and has 35,000-plus American soldiers stationed there. It could easily handle two games a year.
>> Mexico can handle a second game or one could be played in South America.
>> Going in the other direction, one per year could be played north of the border in Canada. With the CFL, there is no shortage of stadiums.
>> Another game each year could be moved among cities on the other continents — Asia, Africa and Australia (but probably not Antarctica).
That takes care of 10 of 16 games. The rest could be played at neutral sites in the U.S. Former NFL cities with stadiums and infrastructure in place such as San Diego, Oakland and St. Louis would be ideal but might not welcome the league back just yet. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other cities with facilities large enough to host a game: San Antonio (Alamodome), El Paso (Sun Bowl), along with just about any city with a Power Five college team.
When I first thought of this more than a decade ago — when the idea of a 17-game season was first being discussed — Aloha Stadium would have been in the mix to host a game once in a while. Las Vegas and Los Angeles were also obvious neutral sites then. And heck, those cities might still work. They have enough residents — or visitors — that they could still host two visiting teams. LA especially has so many transplants that fans of visiting teams outnumber “home” fans at Chargers games. You don’t think a Steelers-Cowboys game at SoFi would sell out? Or Bears-Patriots?
While we’re fixing the schedule, there are a couple more things I’d do:
>> Add a second bye week for each team. Players are already taxed in a sport that has gotten more brutal year by year. That would extend the season to 19 weeks, which means another week of games for the league to sell to television networks, so the owners should love that.
>> Eliminate the short weeks by giving a bye to each team the week before they play on a Thursday. Those short weeks result in some pretty ragged games and, most importantly, give players too little time to recover. Sometimes the NFL will schedule two teams that played on Thanksgiving to play the following Thursday. This year it’s the Bills and Patriots playing on Dec. 1, a week after playing other teams on Thanksgiving. That works too. The main thing is that no one plays without five full days off preceding.
