Autumn is approaching and with it comes the start of another season in the National Football League.
Seven games will take place outside the United States this season, the most in any NFL campaign in history.
But which team is worth your support as the games get under way? And how should you choose?
My Newspaper Sport is here to help.
We’ve crunched the numbers on a wide range of categories to put the information at your fingertips – and if that’s not enough, we’ve got a quiz at the end to work it all for you.
Happy hunting.
Let’s start with the top dogs – the trophy-winners.
Leading the way with six Super Bowls each are the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New England Patriots, the latter all coming since the turn of the century under legendary coach Bill Belichick.
Not far behind are ‘America’s team’ the Dallas Cowboys and the San Francisco 49ers who have each won five.
Taking in the pre-Super Bowl era, the Green Bay Packers have the most NFL championships with 13, including four Super Bowl wins.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are 12 franchises that have never won the Vince Lombardi Trophy – including the Buffalo Bills and the Minnesota Vikings who have both lost four times in the Super Bowl.
Perhaps silverware isn’t everything to you.
If history is more your bag, there are four teams that have been around for 100 years or more. The Arizona Cardinals, Chicago Bears, New York Giants and Packers were all established in the 1920s.
For those who prefer more modern upstarts, look no further than the Houston Texans, who only started competing in the NFL in 2002.
For this exercise, we took a calculation of the centre of the UK being a location in Lancashire and figured out the distance from that point to the franchise’s stadium in the US.
East Coast teams such as the Patriots, Philadelphia Eagles and the two New York teams – the Giants and Jets – are the closest by that metric, coming in at just over 3,000 miles away.
If you would prefer to get as far away from home as possible, shoot across the USA towards the Pacific Ocean and opt for the Los Angeles duo of the Chargers and Rams, fully 5,263 miles away as the crow flies.
Any NFL game is a major event and the US is full of appropriately sized stadiums to suit.
We took the average attendance for each team over the past four seasons to calculate the biggest – and it was the Cowboys’ 93,363 that led the way at their AT&T Stadium home that can hold about 100,000 spectators.
The lowest average? That would be Washington Commanders at 59,559, although their upward trajectory with last season’s offensive rookie of the year Jayden Daniels at quarterback means they may not stay bottom of the pack for much longer.
Taking US weather data from 1991 to 2020, we looked at the range of temperatures from highest to lowest across all 32 areas.
It is no surprise that the hottest areas will affect desert teams the Cardinals and Las Vegas Raiders, with Florida’s Miami Dolphins and Tampa Bay Buccaneers also offering scorching summers and mild winters.
If that is not for you, then 12 franchises have a mean lowest temperature under freezing, including the Vikings whose average in January is a bitter -8.7C.
Since first playing in London in 2013, the Jacksonville Jaguars have played in the UK 13 times, including in back-to-back weeks over the past two years.
That is far ahead of any other franchise, with the Bills and Dolphins closest at eight games outside the US.
Plenty of franchises have barely travelled.
In that group are the Pittsburgh Steelers, who will make only their second international appearance in September when they face the Vikings in Dublin for the NFL’s first Ireland game.
Here’s the data we used for reference.
