Home field advantage in the National Football League is generally thought to be worth about three points, but good luck trying to figure where and why road teams play well or poorly.
Throughout their 94-year history, the cold weather-impervious Green Bay Packers are 6-0 playing in sunny San Diego but 0-6 on the frozen artificial tundra of Buffalo.
The Packers’ 21-13 loss at Buffalo last December was one of the more gutting of those half-dozen defeats because it rippled through the postseason all the way to CenturyLink Field.
Had the Packers knocked off the Bills, they would have run the table on the second half of their season and finished 13-3, giving them home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Their 12-4 mark tied them with the Seattle, leaving their head-to-head matchup as the tiebreaker, which the Seahawks held with their win over the Packers in the 2014 season opener.
A victory over the Bills last December would’ve made Lambeau Field the venue for the NFC title game, but winning in Buffalo has been elusive for a line of Packers quarterbacks spanning David Whitehurst, Don Majkowski, Bret Favre (three times) and Aaron Rodgers.
Another place where the Packers have never won is London. They’ve never lost there, either, and to this point thankfully haven’t had to worry about it. The Packers are among that teams that so far have eluded the extraneous rigors of playing a game in the United Kingdom, although according to Packers president Mark Murphy, something is going to give regarding their 0-0 mark in jolly England.
“We’ll play a game in England, soon,” Murphy said last year, adding, “But it won’t be a home game.”
You can’t blame him for not wanting to give up a home game to play in England. Why would he? Why would anyone?
Logistics alone make it untenable. Unless there is a plan to resurrect the Concorde, the flight across six or seven time zones is a wearying ordeal. Jet lag can take days to shake. It’s a lousy start to a week of practice in any case.
Also, there is no home field advantage playing in England – fans will cheer for the cooler uniforms. Or the uglier ones. Or both, if they’re sufficiently lit.
The only good reason to playing a game in the U.K. is if the city of your team wants to host a Super Bowl. Many cities express interest in hosting, but unless their team has participated in one of the games across the pond, it’s “No Super Bowl for you!”
The NFL has been pushing for decades to grow its product overseas, and there is a degree of tepid curiosity in the U.K. about our game of football. In the rarity/novelty stage, it works. The NFL Europe, the league that the NFL underwrote for 17 years, was a big hit for a few weeks. Over the long haul it was another story.
NFL Europe was a bust you could’ve seen coming with your eyes closed, because there is only one football in Europe and that is the round one. An American football league over there is a niche thing, met with the same lukewarm enthusiasm as our professional soccer leagues are here.
The reason for the continued push overseas is that the Federal tax-exempt NFL has become a behemoth on the business scene, pulling in about $10 billion annually. Not bad for a non-profit. The league is only doing what behemoths do, which is seeking to become an even larger behemoth.
It’s been said that a London franchise eventually becoming an NFL reality is virtually a done deal. If this is true, it’s another doomed effort, one that may pull in some merchandising revenue abroad, but, barring any hypersonic team travel upgrades, as a workable NFL team over a 17-week season is bloody unlikely.
