Will the Jets play an overseas game next year?

by Site Admin

While the schedule won't officially be released for a few months, the Jets already know who their opponents will be in 2019.

What's not yet decided is whether they'll play an overseas game next season. The Jets last played an overseas game in London in 2015 as the road team, with Miami playing host.

Here's what we do know though...

  • The NFL announced that the home teams for the five overseas games in 2019 (four in London, one in Mexico) will be the Jaguars, Raiders, Rams, Chargers and Bucs;
  • Therefore, barring some unforeseen in-season event the Jets definitely will play all eight of their home games at Metlife Stadium;
  • The only one of those five teams that will host the Jets in 2019 is the Jaguars, so that's the only possible match-up for the Jets that might take place overseas; and
  • The Jaguars have a deal in place with Wembley Stadium to play one game there every year until 2020, so if the Jets play overseas it will be in London, not Mexico.

So, the Jets could be the Jaguars' opponent in London next year. They haven't played overseas since 2015, although that was a road game and you might expect their next overseas trip to force them to be the home team. However, is there a more obvious candidate from the Jaguars' other seven home game opponents for 2019? It doesn't look like it.

Let's consider each of them:

We can rule out the Chargers and Bucs because - as we know from above - they're hosting an international series game themselves in 2019.

Other than the Raiders - who've played in Mexico a few times recently as they were in the process of moving away from Oakland - and the Jaguars themselves, it's been extremely rare for teams to play more than one overseas game in a three year span.

We can therefore pretty much rule out the Titans as well because they were in London just last year as a road team and the Saints are probably the next most unlikely as they played in London as a road team in 2017.

Then you have the Colts, who last played in London in 2016, again as a road team, so still more recently than the Jets. Furthermore, this was against the Jaguars, so a rematch would be unattractive if they wanted to have fresh match-ups for the UK fans.

That leaves two other candidates. One is the Chiefs. Like the Jets they haven't played in London since 2015 and they were actually the home team for that game so perhaps London "owes" them a road game. However, they're an interesting case too because they were scheduled to play an international series game just last year only for their game against the Rams to be moved back to the US.

It's widely expected that the Rams home international series game this year will again be the Mexico game, to enable their fans to get to see them now instead. Obviously they won't play the Chiefs for another three years, so it's possible the league plans to schedule the Chiefs to be the road team for a Mexico game within the next few years to again allow their fans to see the other team they missed out on too.

The final candidate is the Texans, who have NEVER played in London. They did, however, play in Mexico - as a road team - in 2016. In-division match-ups are uncommon in international series games, but not unheard of. After all, the Jets' only appearance was against the Dolphins.

It certainly seems possible that the Jets could be the team that faces the Jaguars at Wembley next year, especially with the added layer of Jets owner Woody Johnson being stationed over in the UK these days. However, there's a few other candidates we can't completely rule out.

Last year, the international games were announced on January 11th so we probably only need to wait about a week before we find out.