If these clowns don't want the NFL, why force it upon them?

Joe is an admitted ugly American. He doesn’t have a passport and the only time he ever stepped foot on foreign soil was a week-long work assignment he once had in Hutchinson, Kan.

Joe has no pressing desire to travel to Europe, outside of Italy to eat some great food and sample some awesome women. Oh, yeah. Germany would be a fine trip as well to drink the beer.

(Speaking of which, Joe is ashamed to admit he nearly forgot this is the month for Oktoberfest. In honor, Joe just picked up some brats, which he will grill later today while watching college football, and an ample supply of Caybrew. Props to the Krauts: They have a whole month dedicated to their culture. The Irish have only one day. Ha!)  

Other than Italy and Germany, meh. You can have Europe.

Which brings Joe to playing football in Europe. While NFL warden commissioner Roger Goodell seems to have a boner about London, this is totally lost on Joe. The British don’t want football and while playing regular season games over there, the NFL screws fans back home.

NFL fans pine for eight months a year to have football, go to games, tailgate, etc. Yet Goodell is hell bent on depriving fans something they crave to push a sport upon a people that do not want it.

Case in point, Woody Cummings of the Tampa Tribune. He is in London to cover the game and documented how far down the totem pole the Bucs game is.

During an hourlong train and taxi trip in from the airport, in the city there were no signs promoting the game, and few of the locals who were asked about the game seemed to even know it was going to happen.

“Bloody hate the sport,” said one taxi driver. “I’m a real football fan. Fulham’s my team.”

The newspapers are giving the event scant coverage at this time. The Times of London had one short on the game, and that was a story about Patriots quarterback Tom Brady on Page 91 of Thursday’s edition.

Joe doesn’t know what is more surprising, that a British cabbie would prefer that glorified Easter egg hunt over football or that a daily newspaper in the first decade of the 21st Century prints  (more than?) 90 pages in a Thursday edition?

Good thing for that cabbie Aqib Talib wasn’t a passenger.

Goodell’s fascination over forcing the NFL on an unwanting society is also lost on SI.com’s Peter King.

The league seems bound to play two games a year in London by next year, with as many four on the continent by 2012 and a team there by 2020. Make no mistake about it: These 32 owners want to grow the league and make it a world-wide entity. Just wanted to throw this in: When I was in England in May, I asked 10 Brits if they’d heard of Tom Brady. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. And no.

Look, Goodell can have as many preseason games in Europe or Mexico or Australia or Japan as he wants. In fact, Joe would encourage Goodell to hold all preseason games outside of American soil; let those games soil some other countries.

If a lesser society prefers kickball to football, fine. Don’t force the NFL upon them while screwing your loyal fans in the United States the right to get blasted at a tailgate party and scream obscenities at the opposing 11.