There's a version of football fandom that only exists before nine in the morning, when the stadium lights are already blazing in a city most of us have never set foot in and the coffee hasn't landed yet. That's Sunday in London in a nutshell. The Texans and Jaguars kick off at 9:30 AM ET, and Houston coach DeMeco Ryans confirmed this week that Marvin Harrison Jr. will be out there running routes under those lights. No prop, no number, just a league finding another way to make you set an alarm for football.
why does the nfl keep playing games in london
The international series has been around longer than people remember. The first regular-season game on English soil was played at Wembley in October 2007, the Giants edging the Dolphins 13-10 in a game that felt, at the time, like a one-off experiment. It wasn't. The league kept booking flights, kept selling out the building, and kept discovering that American football travels better than anyone expected. Nineteen years later, a 9:30 AM kickoff barely raises an eyebrow. That's a tell about how normal this has become, not how strange it still is.
how long have the jaguars played games in london
No team has leaned into the London era harder than Jacksonville. The Jaguars have treated a Wembley date as close to an annual home game since 2013, trading a Sunday at home in Florida for a Sunday across the Atlantic nearly every year since. It's a strange kind of homefield, built more on frequent flyer miles than friendly crowds, but it's theirs. The Texans, meanwhile, are the visiting half of the equation this week, jet lag and all.
| moment | year | detail |
|---|---|---|
| First NFL game at Wembley | 2007 | Giants beat Dolphins, 13-10 |
| Jaguars begin annual London series | 2013 | roughly one "home" game abroad per year |
| Texans vs. Jaguars kickoff | 2026 | 9:30 AM ET |
is marvin harrison jr. playing in london
Yes, according to Ryans, and that's the part that actually moves the needle on a Sunday that otherwise might get buried under bigger afternoon windows. Harrison is the reason a Texans-Jaguars game that wouldn't normally crack the national radar becomes appointment viewing for a lot of people who'll be half asleep watching it. There's something quietly romantic about that: a receiver the league has been building toward finally getting his stage, and the stage happens to be a new building in a different country, in front of a crowd that's been waiting all morning just to see him jog out of the tunnel.
what's the honest case against all this
Fairness, mostly. An early kickoff built around a six or seven hour time change isn't free. Both sidelines deal with disrupted sleep, compressed practice weeks, and a stadium that neither team actually calls home, no matter what Jacksonville's deal says. Some players have been candid for years about how much the travel wears on the body, and it shows up in sloppier first quarters more often than the league would like to admit. It's a real cost, and pretending otherwise would be selling you a nicer story than the one that's actually true.
what i'm watching this weekend
I'll be watching how Harrison is used early, whether Houston scripts him into easy completions to get him comfortable in a building he's never played in, and whether the extended travel window shows up in either team's legs by the fourth quarter. Rhamondre Stevenson's workload elsewhere on the Week 6 slate is worth tracking too, a reminder that this is still just one Sunday in a long season. But the image I'll remember is simpler than any of that: a rookie-era talent, an ocean from home, catching a football in front of a crowd that got up at dawn to be there. Checked the almanac, and the league has been chasing that feeling since 2007. Sunday, it finds it again.
For the love of the game, that's still worth setting an alarm for.