All 3 London Games on 2015 NFL Schedule to Have Early-Morning Start Time

NFL fans better make sure the coffee's on when the league's three London games kick off next season.

The NFL announced on Thursday, Jan. 22 that all three games in London for the 2015 season would have the early morning start time, via Around the NFL:

Pro Football on ESPN provided the full schedule:

This won't be the first time the NFL added an early-morning game to the schedule. The Detroit Lions and Atlanta Falcons played at 1:30 p.m. GMT in London this past October.

The MMQB's Peter King wrote at the time that the early kickoff was a part of a larger venture by the league to gauge interest in morning games:

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Not only is the NFL watching closely, but FOX and CBS are keeping their eyes on the game. Sunday morning is a potential fourth window that day, and you can be sure that if viewers flock to this game, at least one game a year from London will start at this insane hour. (Worth mentioning that our Left Coast friends don’t think it’s insane; those in the Pacific time zone see games at 10 a.m. all season.) But the NFL is eyeing the massive TV audience east of the Mississippi—about 76 percent of all televisions in the United States are in the Eastern and Central time zones—to see if it has an appetite for an early game.

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Brian Rolapp, the NFL’s executive vice president for media, added that the league has tinkered with different ideas before, and this is merely the next step:

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This is an experiment. At a certain point you don’t know until you try. In 2006, when we implemented the eight late-season Thursday games, it was pretty controversial. A lot of football purists wanted to burn us for witchcraft. But we were trying something new. It’s the same thing here: How do we make the London games more successful? Is there a market for an early game? I don’t think we’ve ever had a quadrupleheader.

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According to Sports Media Watch, the Lions/Falcons game garnered a 5.5 rating and 8.5 million viewers. Both were low when compared to the figures for a normal Sunday game but viewed as satisfactory given all of the differing factors.

You can bet that if ratings for these games rise or maintain a healthy number, the NFL will continue pursuing scheduling early-morning games.