After painfully enduring the first weeks since August without any football on television (no, I don’t care about the Senior Bowl), I saw an ad in the Chicago Tribune for the Chicago Rush, an Arena Football League team. It got me thinking: what do NFL fans watch during the off-season? Passionate college football fans can follow the recruiting season, but NFL fans who aren’t enticed by the NBA and MLB seasons suffer until the cool breezes return and players report to training camp. Football fans want more.
More may be coming in two big ways. Two rival professional football leagues are starting from the ground up to compete with the NFL, one during the regular season and one during the spring.
The first league, the United Football League (UFL), is an eight-team league created by financier and former United States Football League (USFL) minority owner Bill Hambrecht. This league plans to play games during the NFL season on Friday nights. The league seeks franchises in large metropolitan areas that have no NFL franchises, places like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and maybe even Mexico City or London. Mark Cuban, current owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has lined up for a franchise already. Figures.
The other league will be the All American Football league (AAFL). This is the more intriguing of the two leagues. The AAFL will have franchises in places with a great college football tradition, places like Florida, Tennessee, and Alabama (all SEC schools I might note). This league will play games on Saturdays in the spring, and will boast the stars of college football that never made it to Sundays. They have committed a wild group of former standouts already, including former Heisman winner Eric Crouch (Nebraska), and national championship quarterbacks Chris Leak (Florida) and Tee Martin (Tennessee). Even John Navarre of Michigan has signed on! John Navarre!
Dissimilar to the NFL, where stories of dog fighting, drug use, other deplorable off-the-field behavior are becoming increasingly common, the AAFL aims to earn a different reputation: the league requires that all players must be college graduates. San Diego entrepreneur Marcus Katz, who has funded the league, says that, “There’s so much negative press about the athletes who get in trouble, about how many of them don’t graduate. Why not set a good example?”
I’ve always been a fan of competition, whether it be in sports or business- the more options, the better. While the pessimistic among us will shrug the possibility that these new leagues might compete with the mighty NFL, both the UFL and AAFL will provide an interesting complement to both the seventeen week NFL season and the high flying act that is the Arena Football League.
I often catch my friends or myself wondering what happened to random college football players that were deemed not gifted enough by NFL standards. Loyal fans and alumni will be excited to watch some the careers of their favorite college players not end with their college eligibility. The AFL and XFL seemed to fold because they lacked player recognition, but the AAFL will fix that problem by luring in big name former college football players.
The UFL on the other hand sounds like a simple plan to get fans from NFL-starved cities to open their wallets for some live professional football action. The UFL will probably also tap into the talent that comes from BCS power schools.
As a person who loves the game of football more than any other, the thought of watching the game played even more in its truest form is truly exciting. It will be interesting to see what the NFL’s next move is, if any.
Read the full article (Time)
Also see: the AAFL website and the UFL on Wikipedia
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