NFL team in Toronto.... Could it actually happen?

[Quicksilvre]

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Anyone else puzzled as to how Toronto could possibly get a team before Los Angeles??

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The Chargers, Raiders and Rams all failed there. Also, all of the plans put together by the LA city council usually involve renovating the LA Colosseum without fixing the craptastic neighborhood surrounding it.

[Triumph36]

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In theory, if the sport really took off, what would you guys think of a team in London?

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Never, unless science comes up with a way to eliminate jet lag. And London gets a dome.

[Yads]

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The Chargers, Raiders and Rams all failed there.

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Anyone know why this is the case? The LA market is huge.

[mosdef]

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In theory, if the sport really took off, what would you guys think of a team in London?

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Never, unless science comes up with a way to eliminate jet lag. And London gets a dome.

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There's a week between games. It's not like the players have to fly to London the night before the game.

[Cry Me A River]

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In theory, if the sport really took off, what would you guys think of a team in London?

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Talk about a brutal travel schedule!

They'd have to do something goofy like have London play all their games on the road the first half of the season, and then the second half of the season play all the games at home.

And any visiting team playing in London would do so only right after or right before their bye week.


The NHL has had similar "what if" discussions because there are a number of places in Europe that could support a team (Czech, Scandinavia, Russia) but you'd pretty much need a whole division/conference there to make the travel work.

[jstnrgrs]

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In theory, if the sport really took off, what would you guys think of a team in London?

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I wouldn't mind, but travel might get to be a bit much. (It's fine for an east coast team to go there once, but I think it would be very difficult for them to play 8 away games in america, some of which may be on the west coast). If they added a europe division, it would probably be okay, since that would reduce the number of away games in america. They would have to play all of their games in the evening to make viewing easier for american audiences, and of course, football would have to become much more popular in europe for this to happen.

In theory, I don't mind, but it is not going to happen.

[MicroBob]

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In theory, if the sport really took off, what would you guys think of a team in London?

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Never, unless science comes up with a way to eliminate jet lag. And London gets a dome.

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Flying NY to London isn't THAT much worse than flying Miami to Seattle or something.

Hawaii is in the WAC with Fresno State, Boise State, Louisiana Tech and others. Consider that these are student athletes who aren't always taking charters or direct-flights to get to some of their destinations.

College hockey has some weird conference set ups that include Alaska-Fairbanks being in the CCHA with Michigan, Michigan State, Notre Dame, Nebraska-Omaha among others.
That's some pretty crappy flying there and they don't even take charters so they have to do one connection after another to get from Fairbanks to Anchorage to Seattle to Chicago to South Bend or something.

It's a bit tricky and annoying but it can be done.

It's not like we're talking 20 hours of flying to get to Siberia or something. It's the U.S. to London which really isn't that hard.

Would be somewhat helpful if there were 2 teams out there somehow though.
In-division they could play each other and the U.S. teams from their division could swing out there for 2-game road-trips perhaps.

And out of division you could have a team like Seattle make a 2 game trip to the NY Giants one week and then to London the next week or something.
So there are ways to make it even easier.
But if it was just 1 team out there I still think it's doable.

[MikeyPatriot]

"Flying NY to London isn't THAT much worse than flying Miami to Seattle or something."

What about Seattle to London?

[jstnrgrs]

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In theory, if the sport really took off, what would you guys think of a team in London?

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Never, unless science comes up with a way to eliminate jet lag. And London gets a dome.

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If they started their games at 6pm GMT, that's 1PM EST, which is a typical time for games to start. I don't think jet lag would be an issue as long as they start their games in the evening.

[Bremen]

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If they started their games at 6pm GMT, that's 1PM EST, which is a typical time for games to start

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That was my first thought as well. Teams would not need to change their schedules at all as games would still be played at the same times. The only issue is that primetime games from London would not be possible (which for the NFL is quite a big deal).