FOXBORO -- The Patriots have long been open to playing outside the country, and they could be updating their passports for another game abroad next year.
On Tuesday the league will announce the participants in what will be a record four games played in London in 2017. And a matchup between the Patriots and Raiders next season is being considered as an option for Mexico City, according to ESPN.
The Patriots have played in Mexico City once before for a preseason game against the Cowboys in 1998. They won two regular-season games in London, in 2009 and 2012.
"We love playing outside the country," Patriots president Jonathan Kraft told 98.5 The Sports Hub last week. "We’ve done London a couple times. We actually played in Mexico against the Cowboys in a preseason game . . . and we loved it. That stadium is awesome. You see why the Mexican national team in soccer has such an advantage. If the league asked us to do it, we’d love to do it. It would be a lot of fun."
Player reactions to the idea of playing south of the border were a bit more mixed.
There were those who were excited by the prospect of seeing another city and culture up close. There were others who were wary of the altitude -- at 7,280 feet, Mexico City's elevation is a full 2,000 feet higher than Denver's -- and the air pollution.
"Wherever we gotta play, we gotta play so you can't really control that," said defensive end Rob Ninkovich. "I've never been to Mexico so it'd be interesting to check it out. I did read that it was high. Very high. When I'm at Denver, I'm always sucking gas. If it's higher than that, maybe I'll be sucking more. You feel it. But they feel it, too, whoever you're playing."
New England Patriots
Much was made of the altitude and the air quality before the Raiders and Texans squared off for a Monday Night Football Game at Azteca Stadium earlier this season. It was the first regular-season game in Mexico since 2005.
"Azteca Stadium is the worst place to ever play a sporting event," Eric Wynalda, a 10-year veteran of the US men's national soccer team, told USA Today.
"You can’t breathe. The pollution is so bad that if you don’t have some form of rain that’s brought all that down, you are going to be sucking wind. They (will) break a record for how many oxygen masks they have on the sidelines. The combination of being that high up with pollution is just devastating to the body."
Mexico City physician Jorge Avendano Reyes told USA Today that players may experience "headaches, dizziness, sensation of fatigue, accelerated heartbeat, hyperventilation" when exposed to the combination of the altitude and pollution.
"See," said Patriots safety Devin McCourty, "once you say all that, you're making me not want to go."
Then there's the crowd.
Attendees at this year's Mexico City game chanted gay slurs at Texans players, and Houston quarterback Brock Osweiler complained of laser pointers being used to distract him.
"I never want to say one thing's a difference maker," he said after his team's 27-20 loss, "but certainly having a laser zoomed in your eyeball definitely affects how you play a game."
When Patriots running back LeGarrette Blount was told that Azteca Stadium featured a moat and barbed wire in certain areas to discourage soccer hooligans from storming the pitch, he was surprised.
"That's weird. That's kind of weird," he said. "I feel like, I got my guys there with me so I'm not gonna ever be scared. I got my dudes there. If anything happens . . . We got each other's back."
That the NFL has made more of a commitment to its fans in Mexico makes sense. According to Nielsen, NFL viewership among Hispanics has increased 28 percent in the last five years. Per CNN, the league estimates that Mexico City has the seventh-largest fan base of any city in North America.
As one of the league's marquee franchises, the Patriots are a logical favorite whenever announcements for international games come up. And for some inside the team's locker room, just to be mentioned in the conversation brings with it a certain level of excitement.
"You don't play a lot of games out of the country," said Blount. "I played in London with the Buccaneers. But [Mexico City] would be something new. That'd be something different. We'd enjoy that."
Rookie guard Joe Thuney felt similarly when told the Patriots could be playing in Mexico City next year. After earning his undergraduate degree early at North Carolina State, he used some of his extra time on campus to pick up a Spanish minor.
"That would be awesome," he said. "I've never been to Mexico City. I think it would be a really cool experience . . . I think I'm conversational, but I don't think I'm fluent. It would take me a little bit acclimate -- maybe a couple of days and I'd be fine."
The reality is that if the Patriots do end up in Mexico, they probably won't have much time to absorb the culture or for sightseeing. (And if they handle it at all similarly to how the Texans did, they may be encouraged not to venture beyond the team hotel.)
"It doesn't matter where we play, really," McCourty said. "Other people get to see it, and it's like, 'Oh, that's cool.' But for us, we don't get to do any of that. We just go play the game. When we went to London, we didn't get much free time. It wasn't like, 'Hey, this is London!' It was just like, 'All right. We got a game.' "