Jacksonville is about to become the NFL's road team.
The Jaguars will play 26 of their next 30 regular-season games away from Jacksonville, ESPN reports, and this season they become the first NFL team since 1926 to play in 12 or more stadiums. Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is on that list Sunday. London and Orlando sit on the 2027 slate. Their own building barely registers: Heavy.com reported this week that the Jaguars play only four home games between now and the end of 2027.
Start with what this costs. Every franchise sells home field as the foundational edge of a season, and the Jaguars have traded theirs away for two years. A locker room that spends that much time on planes and in other teams' buildings doesn't get the ordinary rhythms of a professional season. No home crowd to steady a rookie quarterback. No quiet week. Road teams in the NFL already fight an uphill number, and Jacksonville has chosen to fight it 26 times out of 30.
What the organization gets in return is a footprint. London and Orlando read as the league's continued use of Jacksonville as its international and neutral-site tenant, and the brand grows every time the team boards a plane. That is a real return for the owner's ledger. It is not a return the players cash.
I keep coming back to the fans in Duval. Four home dates over more than a year is not a season-ticket package. It is a road-show subscription, and the people who show up in person are absorbing the cost of a schedule built for television and overseas expansion. The players absorb the other half, quietly, in a sport where routine is a competitive advantage.
My read: this is the sharpest competitive tax any NFL team has volunteered for in decades, and it will show up in the standings as an inability to stack wins, because stacking wins usually requires somewhere to come home to. If the coaching staff turns the travel into a genuine bond and the Jaguars defend their neutral-site "home" games in London and Orlando like real ones, I'll be wrong, and I'll say so.
