LONDON -- Sure, a 26-foot animatronic statue of Miami Dolphins defensive end Jason Taylor stood next to Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square on Monday, but for pertinence it probably should've been William "The Refrigerator" Perry.
And yes, it's impressive that changing trains at Waterloo means running across advertising placards of Plaxico Burress and Jeremy Shockey, but maybe they should've gone with Tom Brady and, really, Dan Marino.
It's unscientific, gauging the buried NFL tastes of a soccer empire with 60 million citizens, but as the Dolphins and New York Giants aim for the first NFL regular-season game outside North America on Sunday at Wembley Stadium, the United Kingdom probably does have its favorite NFL teams.
Sorry, favourite NFL teams.
They're probably the Chicago Bears and the New England Patriots, with honorable -- sorry, honourable -- mention to the Dolphins.
That's because the NFL crested in British popularity in the mid-1980s, when a motherland eyeballed its offspring's loud creation of the 1985 Bears -- especially their Refrigerator -- and 4 million Britons watched the Chicago-New England Super Bowl of January 1986.
That's also because in that same era, when Britain's Channel 4 showed weekly NFL highlights, a good many citizens swooned over that dandy young Miami quarterback, Marino.
And that's also because after interest faded to near nil during the 1990s, the NFL has inched upward again in the 2000s within the vast Premier League soccer shadow, and the misanthropic youths who follow it have glommed on to the dynastic Patriots.
In an NFL-UK online survey, the Patriots won, said NFL-UK's Henry Hodgson, who also said that's partly because younger people tend to use websites.
If you're British and your age starts with "4" and you care even a whit, it's probably the Bears or Dolphins or maybe the San Francisco 49ers or Washington Redskins. If you're in your teens or early 20s, it's probably the Patriots.
If you're in your late 20s or early 30s, oddly, it's probably nobody.
"The game missed them," Nick Halling said.
Halling, an uncommonly NFL-astute studio commentator -- he's better than most of his American counterparts -- for the British network Sky, thinks this quirky popularity history has danced with that of English soccer.
