Gamblers>texans

[guest23]

First off, putting a team in London would be a horrible idea IMO. I'm sure teams hate it enough as it is when traveling coast to coast. Think of the west coast teams. It would take them two days to get there! Plus a team in London would be going directly up against the most popular sport in the world right in the middle of it's season.

Adding 4 or 8 teams? Where are they going to find enough NFL quality stadiums for all those teams?

Seems like the NFL has always been against expansion unless some rival league shows a market is good enough or they want to bring a team back to a city which lost one a la Cleveland or Houston. Which they're trying to work LA in to the fold.

First priority for the NFL is always going to be LA. When they get a team maybe, MAYBE start looking outside the U.S. in Toronto or Mexico City. Which I feel are pipe dreams at best right now.

LA isn't a priority as it's already a mature tv market for the league. They will only place a team there if they can get outside money to buy into the market. Any expansion will be a result of the league attempting to expand its tv and marketing footprint The targeted areas that are best suited to grow the viewer base are canada, northern mexico, and western europe. Europe is a huge challenge with the time zone differences but they are looking at creative options. The quickest/easiest expansions would be northern MX as they share US time zones and can be reached easily by southern US cities and obviously canada with its proximity to the northern us cities. Like others have mentioned the talent pool is a huge issue and youth participation in the US is flat to declining so they really need to invest in foreign development if they want to make expansion work. Will anything happen anytime soon. Probably not but 10 years out who knows.

[Gothamite]

Ten years won't change the travel issues. Or the time zone problem.

I know why they want to do it. But it's still an incredibly stupid idea.

[jgiff17]

The only way to do it would be to establish a league in Canada, Mexico and Europe and have a champions league consisting of only the champions of the nfl and the other three leagues that rotate every year through the different leagues and starting in march. Just like basketball it would help development in other countries to know that they could play the big boys and possibly get signed to an nfl team. Traveling outside the usa for regular season games and or playoff games seems to be too much especially when there are enough cities in America to expand to without leaving the borders.

[JayMac]

The Gamblers were also a team in a failed league. Not the sort of history an expansion team wants to latch onto.

As opposed to the first version of the Dallas Texans?

The difference is that the Houston Texans don't throw back to or homage any other "Texans" pro football team. Their identity is entirely their own. You and others wanting the Gamblers back, however, would have them dressing like a failed team in a failed league.

the USFL was a success.

"In 1986, the USFL, having recently decided to compete directly with the NFL, filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the National Football League. The NFL was found to have violated anti-monopoly laws. However, in a victory in name only, the USFL was awarded a judgment of just $1, which under anti-trust laws, was tripled to $3."

Just not a profitable one.

No league, or business for that matter, is profitable after 3 years. Too bad that Trump sealed the fate of the league. It may have ultimately have been successful if it had stuck to a spring schedule.

[tubby34]

If the NFL expands into Europe, they should look Into having a base of operations for each NFL team stateside.

London for instance would practice and run the team out of San Antonio.

The London team would play 4 games in a row on the road in the US and then a 4 game home stand on London with practice and another faculty over there. Cross globe flights should be held to as much a minimum as possible.

Heck maybe a 8 and 8 road/home split.