America loves its football - the brown pigskin kind - almost to a point of absurdity. At this moment in our cultural evolution (or devolution) our appetite for the gridiron seems insatiable. TV contracts prove it. Year-round high school football programs prove it. Brett Favre's still-running Wranglers commercials prove it. Concussion rates prove it. The fact that Trent Dilfer has a job with ESPN and not a high school PE teacher gig proves it.

The tradition of baseball as "America's pastime" is dead - it has been for a while. Thanks to the undeniable action and violence, intense branding and marketing, ever-shortening attention spans and the power of television, the NFL is by far the biggest game in the land, an obese cash cow for those lucky enough to be invested that shows no sign of slowing down at the capitalism trough. These days the American pastime is watching NFL Redzone and tracking your fantasy football team. The purists can snort and huff all they like, but the numbers don't lie.

Take, for instance, a story by Michael Hiestand in the USA Today earlier this month, pointing out that Fox's NFL pregame show on Sunday, Oct. 2 got a bigger overnight TV rating than any of TBS' MLB playoff games up until that point. Or a story at profootballtalk.com, which cited Variety for its data and pontificated on how the lackluster Curtis Painter-led Indianapolis Colts playing on Monday Night Football Oct. 3 could get substantially better TV ratings than the TBS broadcast of the Yankees-Tigers playoff game from the same night. "This represents just one more datapoint demonstrating the NFL's dominance over the American television landscape," writes profootballtalk.com's Michael David Smith.

The truth is the "American television landscape" is just a long way of saying the "American landscape." In America, on TV and in real life, football dwarfs everything.

But that's not good enough. At least not for the rich puppeteers that pull the NFL's strings. When the capitalistic mantra is "If you're not growing you're dying," I guess it's only natural for America's biggest game to force itself on Europe like Ben Roethlisberger targeting a coed in Milledgeville.

Starting in 2007, the NFL has played one regular-season game at London's Wembley Stadium every year. This season, the Chicago Bears will face the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Oct. 23, marking the second time the Bucs have participated in the annual contest - designed to develop the United Kingdom as a viable market for the NFL. The NFL held its first regular-season game outside the United States in Mexico City in 2005, has sent the Buffalo Bills to Toronto for at least one game the last four seasons, and has even held a preseason game in Tokyo - all in an effort to one day globalize the NFL.

On Tuesday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and league owners officially voted to continue holding games in the UK through 2016, and also approved a resolution allowing the league to determine the appropriate number of games held in the UK each season - meaning more than one game in London each year might be coming soon.

"First off, we've been very pleased at the reception to the game and the way that our business has grown over there," Goodell says in an NFL press release quoted by the UK Guardian, despite the fact that this year's game less has yet to sell out. "I think now you want to see ... can it be sustained for multiple games? So we're looking at multiple games over there, and if that can occur, then you're continuing to see that you're responding to what we're providing in the marketplace. That gives you a better sense of whether it could really be a host community for an NFL franchise. That's what we're trying to evaluate."

An NFL franchise in London? It could be coming - perhaps sooner than you think. While permanently relocating a team across the pond might sound farfetched, the NFL has certainly taken note of the fact that what the Guardian calls the "novelty effect" of the yearly game has worn off for UK consumers. To maintain fans' interest the UK will likely need a "home team" to continually root for. That's the way sports works, and it's why the league is discussing the possibility of making one or two teams repeat visitors to London each year.

"When the initial resolution was approved in 2006, the thinking at the time was that we would have two new teams every year," the NFL's vice-president of international operations, Chris Parsons, says in a league press release. "As the series evolved, we felt as though having a team return to the UK on a regular basis would certainly increase the fan base for that particular team, which in turn would drive fan growth for the entire league."

One team rumored to be on the shortlist for this London love? The Bucs, who as mentioned previously, make their second trip to the UK this season. Despite the fact that the Bucs are, quite possibly, one of the most boring teams in the league (even at their most exciting they were led by Brad Johnson), the pairing does make some sense, as the team's owners, the Glazer family, also own the Manchester United soccer team.

As with everything, we'll just have to wait and see what happens ... and the outcome is likely to be dictated by dollars and not necessarily sense.

BOX SCORES

The Chicago White Sox and general manager Kenny Williams announced late last week that former White Sox third baseman Robin Ventura will replace departed manager Ozzie Guillen as the team's skipper in 2012. According to reports on ESPNChicago.com, Williams considered naming current White Sox player Paul Konerko a player-manager, though he never discussed the idea with Konerko and quickly decided that Ventura was the inexperienced man for the job. Other possible candidates for the position included Jack McDowell, Ronald McDonald or Kevin Costner's character in Field of Dreams. ... The much-maligned Denver Broncos announced this week that former Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow will be the team's starting quarterback when the Broncos return from a bye week Oct. 23 for a game in Miami against the Dolphins. Upon hearing the news of Tebow's promotion, The Lord Jesus Christ quickly added the left-hander to his fantasy football team. ... Finally, the Associated Press reports that marathoner Rob Sloan of the British running club the Sunderland Harriers was stripped of a third place finish and personal best time last Sunday at the Kielder Marathon near Newcastle after officials determined he'd cheated. According to the AP, marathon organizers say, "Sloan dropped out 20 miles into the race, hitched a ride on a spectator shuttle bus and emerged from the woods near the finish line to make the podium."