f*@king early London games!

Preach on!

Loser: People Who Like Sleep and Have Melvin Gordon in Fantasy Football

The weirdest thing about the NFL’s London games is how commonplace they seem. The league is choosing to play games overseas, a production that involves sending hundreds of players, staffers, and referees as well as literal tons of equipment across an ocean, and it’s not for a special occasion. It’s not a big season-opening game, as has happened in the NHL and MLB. It’s not a preseason tour, as big European soccer clubs do in the United States. It’s not an exhibition game, as the NFL used to do in Japan. It’s just regular-season games—not even particularly special regular-season games. Just regular ones, a few times per year. I suppose that’s the point: Someday, the NFL hopes that games in foreign countries will be so accepted that they’re just part of the NFL routine. But for now, it’s strange that they play games on a different continent and it’s just supposed to be one of the hundreds of notable things about an NFL game day.

Another weird thing about the NFL in London: They haven’t figured out what time the games are supposed to be. There have been 23 NFL London games, and 10 of them have been at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time (to account for the fact that it’s five hours later in London than it is in the Eastern time zone) and 11 have been at 1 p.m., the same time as all the other games. The league has considered getting rid of the 9:30 a.m. starts, but has kept them for some games, because the league enjoys having four full game windows on Sundays, and that time slot allows for viewership in Asia.

Long story short: We’ve come to stop noticing when there are games in London, and even when we do know that there are games in London, we don’t know what time they are. I’m an NFL writer and I didn’t realize there was a game at 9:30 a.m. Sunday until I checked the upcoming schedule on a whim Saturday night.

All this to explain why Sunday morning, hundreds of thousands of fans across America woke up to find that their fantasy football Sunday had been ruined. Melvin Gordon, the second-most-valuable fantasy football player this year (fifth in total fantasy points, second among flex players behind Todd Gurley) was ruled out of the Chargers’ Sunday-morning game in London about an hour and a half before kickoff—8 a.m. on the East Coast, 5 a.m. on the West Coast. Gordon had shown no signs of injury in recent weeks—he posted 33 fantasy points last week—and wasn’t even listed as questionable on the Chargers’ injury report until Friday after he hurt his hamstring in practice.

I think this is one of the greatest fantasy football catastrophes in history. Most Gordon owners had no reason to suspect he could be pulled from the game, and even those that did probably had little idea that they needed to wake up four hours earlier than usual to set their fantasy lineups. Congrats to those who won their matchups because of this unusual confluence of events; congrats to everybody else on the sleep. It’s Sunday: You’re supposed to sleep. Or watch 15 hours of football.