Nearly eight years ago, sitting on a couch in a hotel room in California, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones had the concept of Olympic flag football on the tip of his tongue and just couldn’t find it.
In an expansive 1-on-1 interview with Yahoo Sports in the summer of 2017, Jones was discussing the growth of the NFL as a globally consumed sport when the subject of untapped markets was broached. At the time, the league was positioning itself to continue a robust international expansion of games in the U.K., mainland Europe, Canada and Mexico, with the ultimate goal of creating a 33rd NFL team through an international aggregate of games — in the hopes of eventually having what amounted to a full season’s slate of matchups played outside of the United States each season.