Supposedly he may wind up playing for a Florida entry in the new A11FL, another spring football league that will bring an exciting brand of high-action football to a season where there isn’t any, taking advantage of blah blah blah blah…
We’ve been down this road before, folks. The USFL. The WLAF. The CFL’s American experiment. The XFL. And those were just the leagues that actually managed to put games on the field. Every decade or so, somebody decides that you know, hang it all, spring football will work THIS time. And this time, instead of NFL support and foreign teams or an existing league elsewhere or pro wrestling gimmicks, the secret sauce that will make it go is…the A-11 offense. You know, the super-gimmick high school offense that relied on a loophole in the rules to make every single player potentially an eligible receiver, so long as the play starts with one guy back as the punter.
This is ridiculous. The governing body of high school football has already outlawed the formation, so it’s based around a system that’s literally against the rules at every level of football. Supposedly we get “showcase games” this spring and the league will launch in 2015, and I will bet any one of you one shiny American dollar that we never even get to the showcase games. Sure, ESPN2 will supposedly be televising this nonsense, but a commitment to show two individual one-off games isn’t a league TV contract. Hell, the UFL went right against the NFL, playing on fall nights when the NFL legally couldn’t, and they had a small number of teams and central cost control and a TV contract and they were a resounding bust.
Major league sports are inherently a monopoly business. You can split it up for one reason or another, like baseball was for years, but that’s largely a function of arbitrary division and an underserved market. Most every pro sports league in North America has gone to between 30 and 32 teams. It’s not as if there are a dozen major markets unserved by a pro team, the way there were in 1959 when the AFL launched to challenge the NFL. You can’t launch a major league in an existing sport, and the money isn’t there to make minor league sports profitable without farm team and player development agreements like baseball and hockey (and the NBA D-league) have.
And it overlooks something else: football has a minor league, and it’s called college football. Hell, college football was there first. It wasn’t until the NFL-AFL wars and merger of the 60s that the pro form of the game became dominant. The SEC is practically a triple-A league for the NFL already. Throw in the fact that spring already has the beginning of MLB and MLS, the playoffs for the NBA and NHL, and nice weather returning when you want to go outside instead of parking in front of the TV all weekend…and you can see why spring pro ball has always run on the rocks, whether it’s 1985 or 1992 or 1995 or 2001.
Or 2014. God bless ya, guys, but one shiny American dollar says you’re going to sink like a rock.