NHL Owner Rescues The AAF With Much Needed Cash

[BhamXFLFan]

Have you been to any Iron games? If so, how was the stadium experience like?

I have not and will most likely not go to any of the games due to not really liking the AAF. Would rather watch them on TV anyways. I have friends that go and enjoy it though. The team is good though!

I'm a fan of them. Luis Perez's story is pretty cool. I really picked them because of TRich playing for the Colts. Even though he was awful, he was a name I recognized. I almost chose the Express, thank goodness I didn't...

I am an Auburn fan so don't care for Richardson that much. Just nice to have a team in the city. really odd that by 2021 Bham will have 4 pro sports teams. (Bham Legion USL, Iron, Barons AA Baseball, Pelicans NBA G team)

[XFL_FAN]

I have not and will most likely not go to any of the games due to not really liking the AAF. Would rather watch them on TV anyways. I have friends that go and enjoy it though. The team is good though!

I'm a fan of them. Luis Perez's story is pretty cool. I really picked them because of TRich playing for the Colts. Even though he was awful, he was a name I recognized. I almost chose the Express, thank goodness I didn't...

I am an Auburn fan so don't care for Richardson that much. Just nice to have a team in the city. really odd that by 2021 Bham will have 4 pro sports teams. (Bham Legion USL, Iron, Barons AA Baseball, Pelicans NBA G team)

Only if XFL 1.0 had worked, then you would've had the Bolts too...

[MikeMitchell]

I have not and will most likely not go to any of the games due to not really liking the AAF. Would rather watch them on TV anyways. I have friends that go and enjoy it though. The team is good though!

I'm a fan of them. Luis Perez's story is pretty cool. I really picked them because of TRich playing for the Colts. Even though he was awful, he was a name I recognized. I almost chose the Express, thank goodness I didn't...

I am an Auburn fan so don't care for Richardson that much. Just nice to have a team in the city. really odd that by 2021 Bham will have 4 pro sports teams. (Bham Legion USL, Iron, Barons AA Baseball, Pelicans NBA G team)

I have always rooted for that market to succeed in alternate leagues. Sooner or later. One of my favorite sports stories is the rebirth of UAB.

[MikeSherman]

If the NFL cared to invest in depth, why wouldn't they just expand the size of the practice squad?

[MikeMitchell]

If the Dundon experiment fails, I would think that the AAF would try to sell it to the NFL first before any potential merger. And the NFL would make drastic changes to the league in regards to teams. I would think they would want a few teams above the Mason-Dixon Line if they were to buy the AAF. The issue would be the weather, so that would eliminate most major cities except Detroit and Minnesota.

The NFL tried this developmental league deal before and they lost hundreds of millions of dollars. A little over 10 years ago, they finally stopped the bleeding and closed up shop.

In 2019, the NFL could keep it afloat and potentially make it work. Football is much harder to operate as a minor league than baseball or basketball. Those sports are so much cheaper by leaps and bounds to run. They’re dirt cheap. You gotta bank on the public caring about a minor league enough to see any return on the hundreds of millions of millions of dollars spent per season. The Gatorade league is great for basketball but how many people actually pay attention to those leagues.

Hockey is just as expensive as football yet minor league hockey does just fine. How many people pay attention to the AHL and ECHL? Yet those leagues still play every season 57 teams spread across the nation to make up both leagues. If hockey can support 57 minor league teams football can support at least 8.

This idea that football is somehow different than every other sport is simply untrue. The NFL may not value a minor league like the other leagues do but minor league football can work. And the money losses weren't the only reason they canceled NFL Europe, most NFL teams didn't want to send players to Europe preferring to have them in their offseason programs. That was the larger issue.

For minor league football (not spring football, that is a different beast) to work it needs play during the NFL season so NFL teams can actually benefit. The NFL has 90 man rosters in the spring, they have no need to have another few hundred playing in a spring developmental league. It is useless to them. If the NFL actually wanted a minor league the way to do it is to play in small stadiums (think less than 10K) and play the games during the week in the Fall providing weeknight programming to NFL Network. This way NFL teams would have guys in game shape to replace injured players instead of grabbing guys off the street. If such a league were formed it wouldn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The problem is that people act like football (minor league or not) is different and must be played in huge stadiums. It does not.

The operational costs for a football league is hundreds of millions of dollars per season. That's not the case in any other sport. If you barebone a league. Pay players and coaches the absolute minimum. If you spend the bare minimum on venues or travel or technology or advertising or insurance or facilities or production or team staffing. You can bring down costs that way.

I agree with you. Football players/coaches/execs/staffs all benefit from more leagues. Everyone wants it. You just need the revenue to make it last and it has to be profitable.

Excluding the finance aspect.... A true minor league could work side by side in theory with the NFL.

NFL teams during the NFL Europe era, had a tendency to not send any of their top developmental players to the league. They didn't want to risk their potential future starting RB tearing his ACL in NFL Europe. So a lot of times, they would send their fringe players. The absolute longshots to make their active rosters. The guys at the bottom of the rung. The 80 to 90 guys on the 90 man roster. Very rare if ever, did the league send a recent draft pick to get training there. Teams were actually scared of sending their true developmental QB to a league that had average to below average offensive lines, for risk of injury. There's also the issue of matching up players with schemes. In a perfect world, every NFL team would have their own minor league team. The minor league teams would mirror the coaching scheme of their NFL counterpart. Like for example, The Eagles would have a minor league team that is using Doug Pederson and Jim Schwartz schemes, so that when they are called up to the major league. There's no re-training involved.

I am not against the concept. Small venues in test markets that are close to the NFL counterparts. Like a Brooklyn team for the Jets or Giants or a Shreveport team for the Saints etc... It would be cool.

[MikeMitchell]

Hockey is just as expensive as football yet minor league hockey does just fine. How many people pay attention to the AHL and ECHL? Yet those leagues still play every season 57 teams spread across the nation to make up both leagues. If hockey can support 57 minor league teams football can support at least 8.

This idea that football is somehow different than every other sport is simply untrue. The NFL may not value a minor league like the other leagues do but minor league football can work. And the money losses weren't the only reason they canceled NFL Europe, most NFL teams didn't want to send players to Europe preferring to have them in their offseason programs. That was the larger issue.

For minor league football (not spring football, that is a different beast) to work it needs play during the NFL season so NFL teams can actually benefit. The NFL has 90 man rosters in the spring, they have no need to have another few hundred playing in a spring developmental league. It is useless to them. If the NFL actually wanted a minor league the way to do it is to play in small stadiums (think less than 10K) and play the games during the week in the Fall providing weeknight programming to NFL Network. This way NFL teams would have guys in game shape to replace injured players instead of grabbing guys off the street. If such a league were formed it wouldn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The problem is that people act like football (minor league or not) is different and must be played in huge stadiums. It does not.

The operational costs for a football league is hundreds of millions of dollars per season. That's not the case in any other sport. If you barebone a league. Pay players and coaches the absolute minimum. If you spend the bare minimum on venues or travel or technology or advertising or insurance or facilities or production or team staffing. You can bring down costs that way.

I agree with you. Football players/coaches/execs/staffs all benefit from more leagues. Everyone wants it. You just need the revenue to make it last and it has to be profitable.

Excluding the finance aspect.... A true minor league could work side by side in theory with the NFL.


I am not against the concept. Small venues in test markets that are close to the NFL counterparts. Like a Brooklyn team for the Jets or Giants or a Shreveport team for the Saints etc... It would be cool.

I disagree with the premise that minor league football is inherently more expensive than minor league hockey. If it costs "hundreds of millions of dollars" simply to run a league small colleges would not be able to operate. When you include payment for athletic scholarships (63 at the FCS level and 36 at the Division 2 level) they basically have the same costs any minor league would have and they are able to operate while averaging less than 10,000 fans per game in most cases.

The reason all that stuff costs so much for football is because every pro league we've ever seen has insisted on playing its games in NFL/FBS/MLS stadiums which are really expensive venues to get leases in. No other minor leagues make that choice. They all put their minor league teams in smaller less expensive facilities which drastically increases the costs associated with running a league.

I disagree that everyone wants it. I don't think the NFL cares at all. If they did it would already exist.

It already existed for the NFL from 1991 to 2007. They had their developmental league.

Paying the players and coaches alone costs 60 million dollars a year even if you pay them 70k a year like the AAF. Insurance alone costs tens of millions of dollars. As does production and technology costs. I haven't gone through all the other expenditures like team staffing like medical, training, office personnel, advertising, travel, lodging and the list goes on and on, and I won't even include venues for the sake of this argument. The venues are expensive but they are not even in the neighborhood of production costs or player/coach salaries or insurance.

Comparing a college program versus an entire league is not a fair comparison. That's not even a real discussion, a small college football program with no players being paid versus an entire league of paid professionals. The NCAA has TV money nationally and regionally that cover a lot of school's costs. They make billions of dollars. The smaller schools don't spend that much money. Their overhead is very low. You can't compare Middle Tennessee State to operating an entire league like NFL Europe.

Hockey teams have 23 player rosters in the NHL. That's a big diffference from that and 50 plus man football rosters. Minor league Hockey doesn't have anywhere near the expenses that a football league has. It's not even in the neighborhood.

[MikeMitchell]

Youngorst.

I appreciate your detailed viewpoint on the subject. I don’t want to go back and forth with 10 paragraph posts. Lord knows that I can already write some very long posts. I think we have already shared our viewpoints in great detail.

Your bareboned minor league model is the only way your football in the fall minor league could work. From a financial standpoint.

I like the idea. It’s not impossible that it happens in the future. It would be totally different from NFL Europe, The XFL and AAF.

[XFL_FAN]

Dundon Has All The Power:

https://sportsday.dallasnews.com/dallas ... nversation

Sports Business Daily reports, citing multiple sources, that Dundon's agreement was "week-to-week" and that Dundon could stop funding on a moment's notice.

It's still possible that Dundon bails out too like the original investor (probably Peter Thiel) did. If the ratings continue to fall, and the attendance takes a downhill turn, Dundon could bail out at any time. This is probably why Dundon invested: No risk.

[Andibald]

Dundon Has All The Power:

https://sportsday.dallasnews.com/dallas ... nversation

Sports Business Daily reports, citing multiple sources, that Dundon's agreement was "week-to-week" and that Dundon could stop funding on a moment's notice.

It's still possible that Dundon bails out too like the original investor (probably Peter Thiel) did. If the ratings continue to fall, and the attendance takes a downhill turn, Dundon could bail out at any time. This is probably why Dundon invested: No risk.

https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2 ... estment/

If Kaplan’s report is accurate (and there’s no reason to dispute that it is at this point), the message is clear: The AAF nearly disappeared after one week of play, and it could in theory disappear after any week of play.

[XFL_FAN]

Dundon Has All The Power:

https://sportsday.dallasnews.com/dallas ... nversation

Sports Business Daily reports, citing multiple sources, that Dundon's agreement was "week-to-week" and that Dundon could stop funding on a moment's notice.

It's still possible that Dundon bails out too like the original investor (probably Peter Thiel) did. If the ratings continue to fall, and the attendance takes a downhill turn, Dundon could bail out at any time. This is probably why Dundon invested: No risk.

https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2 ... estment/

If Kaplan’s report is accurate (and there’s no reason to dispute that it is at this point), the message is clear: The AAF nearly disappeared after one week of play, and it could in theory disappear after any week of play.

While the AAF could disappear "after any week of of play", the XFL doesn't have to worry about any bailouts. The only person who can pull the plug this time around is Vince McMahon himself. I'm so excited for 2020 !