Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers appeared to pull back the curtain on what NFL owners had proposed in the past regarding the International Series.
“There was talk about doing a week — an international week — where you had games in 16 different places and you just added an extra bye week,” he said, per ESPN.com. “So you play 16 regular-season [weeks], you have two bye weeks — one of those weeks would’ve been an international week.
“I think it would’ve been phenomenal for the game. Now the owners wanted to push for 17 games for the extra revenue and because they care so much about player safety, but it would’ve been nice.”
An “international week” makes some sense from the standpoint that every team would be on equal footing in dealing with the effects of traveling abroad. Then you have the added benefits of an extra bye week for the players to rest and reset.
Actually pulling off this idea would be very difficult, though.
There’s the challenge of identifying 16 different locations that would be suitable for games. Beyond figuring out the cities themselves, securing the venues wouldn’t be easy when the NFL often uses stadiums reserved for world football clubs. Scheduling conflicts would inevitably arise.
Then there’s having to line up multiple different time zones with American viewing windows. The most extreme example of this to date came when the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers played at 10:35 a.m. local time in Melbourne, Australia, to get a prime-time slot on the East Coast of the U.S.
The NFL’s media partners presumably wouldn’t love having an entire week without games, either.
A dedicated international week might’ve been a nonstarter for NFL owners once they weighed all of the logistics.