THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
The NFL opened the International Series this year with the first two of three games in London, and since this is England, let's begin by talking politely about the weather. It was great! Unexpectedly so for the first game, the Vikings against the designated home team Saints, and even better for the second a week later, the New Jersey Football Giants against the designated home team Green Bay Packers. It was a perfect fall day, the kind of day that made me wish there were swathes of green fields around Spurs' stadium, on which people in station wagons were tailgating waving pennants instead of scarves.
Actually, almost no one seems to buy the traditional British team scarves being hawked up and down the roads to the stadium. Instead, of course, they are wearing jerseys. One of the great things about games in London is that they bring out a sort of rainbow coalition of football fans, although this year, whether because there are fewer seats (Spurs holds around 60,000, Wembley, where the third game is played, is around 80,000) or that tickets are, inevitably, more expensive, the proportion of partisan fans seems to have increased, to the point the stadium sounded like Packers, and to a lesser extent, Saints home games. Talk about Always Playing Away!
My favorite random jersey spotted was a Patriots' mid-80s throwback with Woodhead on the back; atavistic on two counts. The most badly thought out jersey was the guy wearing a Brett Favre Vikings jersey (yes, if you don't recall, Favre did play for the Vikes), which was repping the brand after a couple of weeks in which it turned out Favre was engineering a misuse of Mississippi welfare funds to help pay for a new volleyball stadium at his former college, Southern Mississippi, where his daughter just happens to play volleyball. I suppose the fan could have worn a Favre Jets jersey to make it worse.
The most popular Vikings jersey by far was Adam Thielen, with Justin Jefferson second. I guess that's because Thielen is a native Minnesotan. The Saints fans preferred Alvin Kamara, with Cameron Jordan surprisingly second (I like fans who like linemen) and Drew Brees, two years gone at this point, third. No prizes for guessing the almost ubiquitous domination of Aaron Rodgers Packers shirts; none were clever enough to have Ivermectin added above number 12. The Giants had no obvious winner, there was Barkley and Jones but also a lot of tributes to past stars, Odell Beckham especially, and quite a few Eli Mannings, which goes to show what a TV program with your brother can do for your Q factor.
Both the Tottenham games were thrillers; the Vikings picking up their win after Will Lutz's attempt at a 61 yard field goal to send the game to overtime double-doinked off goal post and cross bar. Lutz had hit a 60 yarder a few minutes earlier to tie the game, but the Vikings replied with a 46 yard kick of their own by Greg Joseph, following a 39 yard pass from Kirk Cousins to Jefferson. The Saints had their best corner, Marshawn Lattimore, isolated on Jefferson; on the previous series the Vikings had seen that and challenged Lattimore, who was called for a reasonably egregious pass interference penalty. So when they lined up again in the same formation to get the same match-up, it was obvious they would go that way; Lattimore had to be more careful and Cousins dropped his best throw of the day in over his shoulder. The odd thing was that Joseph received the NFL's special teams player of the week award for kicking what turned out to be the game-winning FG; the NFL somehow overlooked that he had missed an extra point which would have given Minny a four-point lead, which meant Lutz would never have even tried his 61 yarder. But maybe that was a case of complex thinking by the league: no miss, no double doink!
The Giants upset of the Packers was the more interesting because it was so surprising - even though both teams were 3-1. Green Bay encountered a sort of perfect storm from the G-Men: offensively Brian Daboll and his offensive coordinator Mike Kafka (I will avoid calling the offense Kafka-esque) have made Jones, Barkley and company effective: helped the fact that Barkley has been healthy for the first time in years, though he got dinged in this game and impressed everyone by coming back out to help the team. As an aside, I know I am getting old because I used to do the call of some of Kafka's college games, when he was at Northwestern and I was doing Big Ten games for Screensport: if you somehow got trapped listening to the ITV play by play of the game, well, I'd suggest you dig out an old Screensport tape and see what is possible for just one announcer working off-tube, not on site, to make a game feel interesting, much less exciting.
Daboll, who comes from the Bill Belichick coaching family, has first of all got the Giants offense to avoid the turnovers and mistakes that lose games. This doesn't make Jones another Eli Manning, but it makes it easier to stay in games, which leaves you a shot at winning. He knows Barkley is his only big weapon, but as he did in Buffalo with Josh Allen, he's designed an offense to be Jones-friendly when they need to pass, and also encouraged Jones to run; for all we think of Allen as a devastating runner now, he wasn't that in college, but Daboll recognised the threat of the run could buy him a little time while passing. They're doing it with a line rebuilt by two high draft picks at tackle and three journeymen inside; all three veterans understand their roles and thus far have avoided horrible blown blocks and stupid penalties.
The other key was what new defensive coordinator Wink Martindale, late of the Baltimore Ravens, did to Green Bay. He looked at their receiver group and thought the same thing Aaron Rodgers seems to think: none of these guys is a game-breaker, someone you have to account for. So he covered them mostly man to man, which left players to use in different roles underneath, to help against the run, to blitz Rodgers, and to occasionally fill zones underneath to confuse the maestro. In fact, I thought the Man of the Match, as we say in Britain, was Giants' giant defensive tackle Dexter Lawrence, listed at 6-4 and 342 pounds Celsius, who controlled the interior throughout the game. It was interesting to see Rodgers go up to Martindale after the game, as if to say “wish the Ravens hadn't let you go”.
Because what was strange was the way Green Bay, or Rodgers, or coach Matt LaFleur, failed to adjust to what Wink was cooking. The Packers biggest threats are their two running backs, Aaron Jones and AJ Dillon, and in fact they have been most successful when they play together, in what's called the “pony” set. Since both can catch the ball, this presents defenses with a problem in terms of stacking to stop the run or adding coverage to account for the threat. Yet when the Giants took the lead in the second half, after a long, time consuming drive, Green Bay came out and gave the ball right back as Rodgers threw three desultory long sidelines passes to receivers who were man covered and not open. Go figure, especially because, on the other side of the ball, Packers' defensive coord Joe Barry persisted in playing a zone defense, although the Giants' receivers are hardly more threatening than the Packers'. This left openings for easier reads and completions for Jones, and as the game went on the Packers D, on the field for much more time, seemed to suffer that international jet lag that is hard to predict accurately, but easier to see when it strikes. In the end, the Giants win was most surprising in the way they won it - and the philosophy applied seemed almost a throwback to the glory days of Bill Parcells.
It's hard to overstate the difference that the NFL's staging of real games in London has made to the league's popularity - and to the life of expats longing for a touch of fall magic. It was virtually the first decision Roger Goodell made as commissioner, to ditch the NFL Europe and begin the International Series. I didn't like it much at the time, because I had covered the NFLE through virtually all of its life, and watched players who might not have had NFL careers - everyone from Kurt Warner to Dante Hall to La'Roi Glover to Joe Andruzzi to James Harrison - go on to the league and in some cases stardom. But Goodell recognised that the league, while good at player development, was not serving its other aim, to promote the game. Although crowds in Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Hamburg were big and enthusiastic, London (after the early bloom of the Monarchs in '91, where Wembley was heavily papered), Scotland, Barcelona, Amsterdam and even Berlin had never been able to break through. And though the league lost money on Europe, at the time it was shut down that was still less than a million per team, which could be looked at as less than that, since revenue is shared with the players, and worth it if you got one or two starters at league minimum, or even saved a couple of injury settlements. I'd love to see an NFL-run development return in the spring, even if run on scattered sites around Florida.
But nothing sells the sport like the real game-day experience, and the willingness of the NFL to open its regular season to games abroad was an eye-opener. The association football (the sport the English upper classes called “soccer”) establishment still can't understand how a team with only eight home games in a season would give up one: nor would any soccer fans. But for the NFL, its media profile in London increased, even if some media in 2007, when the series started, seemed to have never noticed the 20+ years of NFL on TV, nor the previous exhibition games. The games have been profitable too, and that has allowed the league to cover the lost revenue from home dates its teams miss, which is a much greater problem with say, Green Bay, than with Jacksonville.
Two things are not coincidental here. The Packers were the last of the 32 NFL teams to play a game overseas. Not only is the home field advantage at Lambeau Field huge, the eight home games are essential to the economy of the city of just about 100,000 people. So it was no surprise they resisted, even if the team were compensated, because not only did it risk irritating the season ticket holders who hold every seat in the stadium, but also hurting the businesses and the townspeople who depend on the ancillary income from home games. After all, they are the onliest team in the NFL owned by its fans, not by some potential megalomaniac billionaire.
The other non-coincidence is that the expanded schedule in the NFL, the 17th game, provided Green Bay with nine home dates this season, which meant that although coming to London cost them a game at Lambeau, they still had the traditional eight, and come 2024 they will enjoy that ninth game every year. So it was win/win for the team, and for the league, who got to bring the league's arguably most historic franchise and (provided the UK didn't require Covid vaccination) its reigning two-time MVP to London. And it was win/win for the British fans, along with the wonderful weather.
