Sunday’s contest between the Bears and Raiders is the NFL’s 25th game in London, an ongoing series that dates back more than a decade to 2007.
Amazingly, in all the games that the NFL has exported to London over the past 12 years, the league has never been able to pick a matchup featuring two teams with winning records at the time of kickoff.
There have been games, like Sunday’s, where one of the teams has a winning record and the other is .500 (the Bears are 3-1 and the Raiders are 2-2) and there have been some in which both teams were knotted up (3-3 Giants vs. 3-3 Rams in 2016), but the majority of games have either been a team with a winning record playing a squad with a losing record (14) or a pair of losing teams playing each other (eight).
“In part that’s because the NFL has tended to send teams to London that struggle to fill their home stadiums, and those tend to be the worse teams in the league,” according to ProFootballTalk. “But it’s also just been bad luck some years, with games that looked good on paper when the schedule came out becoming stinkers by the time the teams took the field.”
But there’s hope. Following Sunday’s game, the next NFL game in London will take place next weekend during Week of the NFL season. The 2-2 Bucs are slated to play the 2-2 Panthers in that matchup. If they both win this week, the NFL will finally send over two winners.
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