American football has somewhat begun to take-off in England over the last decade. Every university has a team, local clubs are growing, and the NFL International Series is the most popular that it has ever been. The prospect of an NFL team moving or even being founded in London has however, been received with different levels of enthusiasm by British fans. I am most certainly in favour.
My favourite moment of the NFL season was the hard-fought victory by the Green Bay Packers over the Dallas Cowboys. This game really epitomised the reason I love football. With 15 seconds to go, arguably the most inform quarterback in the National Football League has just been sacked for a big loss by a safety blitz from the Dallas secondary. Aaron Rodgers comes back and doesn’t even call a play in the huddle. He simply tells the receivers to go to specific areas of the field to find the weak areas of the cushioned zone the defence is running. The snap goes off, Rodgers scrambles to his left, under pressure from a defensive end, and throws the ball on the run to the side-line where Jared Cook, the Green Bay tight end, slides with his knees and catches the ball to put the Packers within field goal range. Mason Crosby, the Packer’s kicker, steps up and makes a 51 yard field goal to win the game and beat Dallas in the divisional playoffs for the second time in three years. It’s good.
As far as other exciting moments in my four years of following the sport go, I could point to the Raiders Saints game in week one of the season, or the crazy Dallas-Pittsburgh game with the fake spike and Ezekiel Elliot’s magical game winning run, but this game was in the playoffs—the ‘winner takes all’ knockout round of the NFL. I understand that for a
first time reader, what I’ve described above might honestly make absolutely no sense and for a long time I didn’t know what any of those words meant either, but the growth of ‘Britball’ could mean that this will soon no longer be the case.
American Football in Britain has supposedly “really taken off” according to pundits on Sky Sports’ ‘Sunday Night Football’. More and more people are playing at a grassroots level and there is a new BBC highlights show every week that many people tune in to watch or catch up with on IPlayer. There are going to be a record four NFL games played in the UK next year featuring playoff team the Miami Dolphins and the newly relocated LA Rams.
The possibility of a London franchise is serious: George Osborne, speaking in both 2014 and 2015 has said that it could be achieved in the next “four or five years.” Teams moving is something that occurs fairly regularly in America, though somewhat of an alien concept in this country. For example, the original Los Angeles Rams moved to St. Louis for 20 years before returning to LA and the famous Colosseum stadium for this season just gone. The San Diego Chargers are, this off-season, moving to Los Angles as well and the current Oakland Raiders have, relatively recently, filed paperwork to relocate to Las Vegas.
The team most often cited as being the candidate for London is the Jacksonville Jaguars, owned by Shahid Khan, who also owns Fulham FC. The Jaguars (or Jags) are a young team with some good young playmakers such as Allen Robinson at receiver and first round pick last year Jalen Ramsey at cornerback. Their biggest struggles come at quarterback with Blake Bortles having a regression in performance from, what was a decent showing in 2015. If the Jaguars do move, which I personally hope they do, the sport can surely only continue to grow in this country and guarantees at least eight NFL games to be played in London every year, a prospect many fans in this country can only dream of.
