I just read about Wm. Perry and notice that he got a Superbowl ring.
Don’t Superbowl winners get a medal like our FA Cup winners do
I’ve never heard of a medal for a championship in American pro sports…at least not in the Big Three…Football, Baseball, and Basketball. The players get rings, really expensive rings, presented at their home stadium, usually early in the following season. Think college sports also give rings for national championships.
Heh, the American commentators just said that ‘soccer’ fans emphatically never boo their teams. Heh, I minimized my game just to post that, in case any UK posters missed it.
Are they going to play at Bobo and Goober later on?
Why play in London anyway? What does the NFL get out of it? Is the NFL really expecting to make significant inroads into British markets?
Because football is traditionally a working class sport and the followers are used to being paid weekly.
Where can I get one of these 75 week years? Are the extra 23 weeks holiday, or do you have to work them?
Sadly, yes they do. I have no idea why; I think it’s a ridiculous idea. But the commissioner is gung-ho about it.
I worry that they will add more games to the regular season just so every team can play overseas each year, instead of only two teams going.
Last year the average salary for an NFL player was $1.4M. The median was about $800,000. The average career of an NFL player is only three years, though.
http://asp.usatoday.com/sports/football/nfl/salaries/mediansalaries.aspx?year=2007
That second figure was supposed to be dollars. Oops.
I was actually at this game, but as it was the first time I’ve ever attended an event with more than 500 people I can’t actually speak authoritatively on the volume of the support in there, but I’ll do my best. Contrasting it with British football games I’ve seen on the TV, from where I was sitting there was hardly any chanting and precious little incoherent shouting. That’s not saying I don’t think people were enjoying the game, but I suspect that the lack of partisanship mentioned upthread contributed in some measure to the volume of support. I’ve also noticed the post-match commentaries don’t appear to have anything to say about this, when last year the match reports were quite enthused about the volume in the stadium; who knows.
Anyway, as the first major event I’ve ever attended it was a fun game to watch, so thanks for lending us a couple of your teams for a week.
There’s been a large UK following of American “Football” since the early 1980s: Channel 4 (one of the four national TV stations back then*) picked up the rights to show NFL highlights, and it used to be a v. popular weekend show.
As a 10y/old at school all my mates had a favourite NFL team… I chose 49ers, my brother was a Bears fan, the lad across the road supported the Dallas Cowboys and another lad followed Miami Dolphins etc etc.
I remember running downstairs on 23 Jan 1989 and begging my Dad to tell me who won Superbowl XXIII, and then swaggering around the playground basking in the victory of “my” team. 
We bought replica shirts, helmets, sweaters, t-shirts… you name it, almost as much as proper football gear! In the playground I was either Joe Montana or Jerry Rice, my brother was William Perry, my mate Paul was always Dan Marino.
So it’s been popular for ages, but the time difference and the length of the games meant it didn’t fit into UK broadcasting schedules (especially as with only 4 channels screen-time was at a premium anyway).
*yes, I grew up in the UK in the 90s with a choice of 4 buttons on my TV remote
It’s a ridiculous idea in terms of sports logic - they’re not going to be expanding the league to Britain anytime soon - but a very good one for marketing. There are plenty of furriners who watch the NFL, and increasing its visibility once or twice a year is not a bad idea.
You probably wouldn’t know this, but Jordan sneakers were almost as popular overseas as they were here in his heyday, maybe moreso, and I don’t think NBA basketball was even televised in Britain back then.
If the NFL can sell an extra 50,000 jerseys by playing a game or two at Wembley every year, that’s $5 million or more in extra revenue. Now throw in all the t-shirts, caps, extra copies of Madden (the NFL and NFLPA get a per-sale license fee) and other assorted licensed junk and we might be talking about $10 million or more- just in extra merchandising. I’m sure there are myriad ways the league’s revenues will benefit outside that, too.
Adding on to what Wallenstein said, I’ve been a Bucs fan for nearly twenty years, and I couldn’t even watch live NFL games other than the Superbowl (where we obviously weren’t going anyway) until 1996, when I moved to the US.
As a 10-year-old lad, you were already demonstrating superior taste.
I believe they’re toying around with the idea of playing a Super Bowl in Wembley.
Seconding what Wallenstein said. If you were a kid in the late eighties/early nineties over here then you almost certainly got a taste of NFL.
That means there’s a whole lot of people out there who are partial to the game, even if they don’t have a particular team they follow. That means there’s potentially a lot of “unattached” fans out there for teams to pick up.
I couldn’t make this year’s game unfortunately, but I was at the first game last year.
As a Giants fan (courtesy of my time in New York), being able to watch them win against the Dolphins on my home turf before going on to win the Superbowl is something I will never forget.
Oh come now. Lineman may have a few fast starts, but there’s a reason that tackle football teams measure players’ footspeed only in the 40 yard dash. Over the longer 100 metre distance no lineman could ever keep up with an actual Olympic sprinter.
This probably happens more often than a player’s career ending due to age. Typically, it’ll be something like a knee injury that doesn’t allow the player to perform up to the demands of the team, and he’s cut.
Football players get hurt all the time. Take the quarterback position, in the entire history of the NFL, only 5 quarterbacks have managed to get through 6+ consecutive seasons (>100 games) without missing a game. Hell, the teams are required to publish an injury report every week, to show which players are injured, and how badly.
Even if they’re not hurt badly enough to miss a game, they take a miserable beating. It’s very common for retired football players to live with pain due to the damage their bodies take during their career. There is a lot of contention right now between retired players and the NFL Players Union over medical benefits. Believe me, this wouldn’t be an issue if these retired players didn’t need a whole lot of medical care.
To continue the growing up in the late eighties theme, I was a Cowboys fan as they were the only team I knew of due to their stadium’s appearance in the Dallas title sequence.
Since moving to Sweden I have become great mates with an Eagles fan from Philadelphia. He is not impressed by my Cowboys anecdote.
Well, as a 10-year Chargers season ticket holder who actually attended the game in London, I think I should probably chime in here.
The atmosphere was pretty good for the most part, but certainly nothing like you would get in the US. The large majority of attendees were there as football fans, not really as Bolts or Saints fans, so the usual partisanship was weirdly absent. The NFL pushed hard to get unaffiliated English fans to adopt the Saints for the day (it being a Saints “home game”) and that seemed to work pretty well. There was definitely a pro-Saints bias in the crowd, even though the number of Saints and Chargers fans walking around London during the week was pretty even as far as I could tell.
Joss Stone did an OK version of the English national anthem, I think, but she was totally drowned out by the fans singing. I mean, TOTALLY. The only time you really caught her was when she was out of time with the crowd. Part of that, of course, was due to the fact that the beautiful new Wembley has without a doubt the worst stadium sound system I have ever had the displeasure to listen to in my entire life. It is unfathomable to me that they could have spent so much money (and so much extra time than they were supposed to) on that stadium and come out of it with a PA system that is completely unintelligible to someone sitting, as I was, in the 20th row.
As for the game itself - except for the final score (in my very biased opinion), you couldn’t have asked for much better than a 37-32 shootout after last year’s debacle in the mud. The field was still bad, by the way, but nothing like the bog they got last year. The only downside was that a number of penalties, video reviews, and unintelligible referee explanations always seemed to suck the life out of the place just as it was really getting going. But there was a pretty good wave at one point, and it didn’t rain, so all-in-all it was a pretty great night.
I even got on TV for a good 15 seconds, though it apparently didn’t make the US broadcast. Oh well.