Not Quite Friday Night Lights...

I'm in the process of training for the Zurich Marathon, so this past Friday I made my way out for a 70 minute training run at around 6pm. As I ran along my normal route in the park, I noticed the stadium lights on one of the park's main "football" (soccer) fields illuminating the field with little dots in motion on it. This isn't out of the ordinary; most nights there is a soccer or rugby game being played. I presumed that this particular evening was no different.
As I continued along the path, though, I started to hear something that peaked my interest in the action on the field. I was still too far away from the field to be able to see what was going on, but that didn't matter, the popping and the grunting told me everything I needed to know. I was still over a mile from the field, but the cracking noises were the unmistakable sound of collision.....I knew without a doubt that on the field in front of me, I was going to find a host of Swiss boys playing the American variety of football on this Friday night in Geneva.
When I reached the field, I jogged off the trail over to the rugby/soccer field where about sixty boys dressed in poorly fitting pads were warming up in a very strange way and asked the coach in my best French what time the game started. He said I had forty minutes so I continued my run and figured I would stop and watch a bit at the end of my run. I finished my brutal training and made my way back over to the field to watch what I assumed would be a very amusing half hour or so of football.
Like I'd imagine all football fanatics from Texas would be, I was naturally incredulous of the idea of a bunch of soft Swiss kids speaking French playing the only remaining sport that is truly American.
My skepticism proved well founded. They played without kickoffs. Most of the players were, there is no nice way to put this, goofily formed. There were short fat kids, tall lanky kids. One team's offensive line was formed of what I can't help but concluding were the smallest, most unathletic members of the team.
On defense, one team lined up with two defensive lineman, two linebackers, four corners, and three safeties. The first play from scrimmage, the miniscule, not that fast, not that strong, not that athletic running back for the other team slashed through a ten yard wide hole, into the secondary where I'm pretty sure each and every one of the team's seven defensive backs failed to successfully bring the running back down.
The running back ran (very slowly) sixty five yards before he tripped over his own feet at the three yard line, stumbled forward, and finally fell into the end zone.
On the extra point, the one thing I presumed they would be good at since the best athletes in Europe almost all play football (soccer), the long snapper overshot the holder by about five yards. The kicker picked up the ball, ran around like a chicken with his head cut off, and then fell to the ground in order to avoid the unruly mob of misshapen softies that would have surely done him in.
There was no kickoff. They just gave the other team the ball somewhere between the 27 and 35 yard lines (I couldn't really tell, and it was never the same in the half hour that I watched).
Given just how poorly the white teams seven defensive back scheme had fared, I figured their offense would be just as horrible and would send me home quite quickly, laughing at myself for even bothering to waste my time watching. But then something happened.
After two poorly designed run plays had yielded a total of about one yard, the white team came to the line in the shotgun. The quarterback stood about 6'2 and probably weighed 180 lbs, was clearly the most athletic person on the field. Although he was wearing shoulder pads that were about 19 sizes to large, he managed to look like a football player. I'd noticed this before he took the snap, rolled to his right, stepped up and threw an absolutely gorgeous fly route that hit his receiver perfectly in stride at the opponent’s ten yard line for an easy score. The ball travelled sixty yards in the air. My jaw dropped to the floor.
I stayed around for another hour. The quality of the football was beyond awful. I was simply there to watch #10 on the White Team. His footwork was abdominal; his decision making was also pretty awful. But the kid was big, fast, strong, and my God did he have an arm.
I'm going to go back next Friday at 5 and watch a little more, but it got me to thinking. The NFL is not going to go global. Despite the Friday night game in Geneva, I have seen little sign that anyone in Europe gives a damn about professional football. But just because there aren’t any pro teams does not mean that there won't be talented football players. If we hypothetically assume that a city like Geneva has three different youth football leagues (by youth I mean high school) with five teams a piece, and you spread that same amount across Europe, there is talent that is going unfound and undeveloped.
A number of MLB team's have started baseball development academies in Latin America. Along with growing the game internationally and giving talented kids a chance to at least temporarily escape the harshness of the local conditions and thrive in an instructional environment where they learn from the best teachers in the business, the academies also serve to identify and develop talent. If it serves a good cause, grows the game, aaand could yield prospects that might help down the road, why on earth would a team not want to start one (or more) international academies.
NFL franchises should be copying this model. Because there is no minor league system in the NFL, it's less likely that a prospect developed by an individual franchise's academy will end up with the team down the road, but it's possible. All I know is that I found out that believe it or not, some people do like football over here and while most of the kids suck, I found at least one kid with NFL caliber arm strength (I'm not kidding, in my three years of regularly making it out to Texans training camp, I've never seen a Texans quarterback with the arm strength to flick the ball 60 yards with as little effort as that little Swiss dude). Every other professional league is reaping the benefits of globalization. Why not the NFL? It's time.