Arena Football League to cease operations
 

Per ESPN:

Reports: Arena Football League will fold soon, declare bankruptcy - ESPN


They had a good run of it and I suspect, given the league's patent, it'll perhaps be back in other form at some point. But...it seems the current entity just wasn't able to go on as it is. Sad, but I think that it grew too fast towards the end there and the hype never matched up with what people were actually putting behind it. And when the talent stops being as cheap as it was in the earlier days, that doesn't help either in a thin margin sport that's just a gimmick to begin with.

Oh well.

I figured once the LA franchise went under, it was just a matter of time.

Last AFL game I went to was Arena Bowl XI in 1997 (with Kurt Warner). The sport's model was always entertaining. It will make a comeback in better economic times, you can be sure of that.

Philadelphia Soul are champions again!

Someone check on Pumpy!

How many years will I have to wait before my autographed game-worn Corey Johnson Cobras jersey is worth some money?

As obsessed as people in this country are with HS, NCAA, and NFL football, it suprises me that no other football league has managed to have any real success. I mean, was the AFL the last league to actually be called a success?

I went to a Rattlers game a few years ago. The experience was ok, but nothing spectacular. I also saw a GR Rampage game quite a few years ago before they folded, and I found the games to be very much a gimmick. Didn't feel all that competitive, more like an act. In reality, the best part of the games was the cheerleaders (very nice), the product itself was mediocre at best.

They will be back in due time with a different name, but the game itself won't change, and that is the real travesty here.

I've got three bucks right here that says the USFL was a winner.

I stand corrected, sir.

:+1:

Pumpy Tudors

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Uh oh. He hasn't been online since the news broke. Check the obituaries! :(

SI

If the league is folding and is bankruptcy, won't that likely lead to a liquidation of assets? Given that the AFL was a single-entity league, it seems like it would be pretty easy for someone to take ownership of the league patent and operations.

Is this the moment the NFL has been waiting for to swoop in and buy the AFL and run it themselves? It's not an ideal minor league system but it's a lot better than other avenues and has produced some successes. If you follow the WNBA model and affiliate teams with NFL operations you can streamline costs significantly.

The last one I went to was a Detroit Drive game at Joe Louis Arena back in 1989 or so.

Between the Michigan Panthers' USFL championship and the Detroit Drive's four Arena Bowl championships, I feel those two teams stole all the good professional football karma from this state. Poor Lions.

I feel bad for my sister-in-law's brother-in-law, Steve. He was the trainer for the Grand Rapids Rampage.

Why would the NFL want to pay to run a minor league when the NCAA gives them one for free?

Presumably this means the end of the AFL2 as well? They're still playing at the moment, they're right in the middle of the playoffs.

If arena football gets off the ground again, it would make sense to focus on smaller cities, and AFL2 obviously has a lot of franchises in place. I don't know exactly what they draw in Boise, but I see a lot of Burn jerseys around town on gamenight.

I wonder if AF2 is a different entity within the auspices of the AFL. Because they could just fold the Arena League, bring that league back as the top division and keep going, if it's working for them.

Because with the patent and the aforementioned desire people have for indoor football (and their niche that's not like the others..) they've got to make it work somehow.

It'll be interesting to see what happens, but I think they killed themselves getting into bed with NFL owners and trying to make themselves a major league sport, without the dollars to make that work for them.

OK, here goes. I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I'll try to keep this post short.

I can't fault somebody for not liking Arena Football, as I understand that it's not for everybody. What I don't understand is why people ever try to compare it to the NFL or NCAA football or whatever. It's a completely different game, and the AFL always acknowledged that. Yes, it was made up of players who played "regular" football, but it wasn't regular football in a 50-yard box. It was something different. Now, if a viewer had gone into it with that perspective, it probably wouldn't have seemed bad. If a viewer expected to see anything resembling the NFL, of course it would be a disappointment.

As far as the league apparently folding, it all comes down to the dollars. Salaries were too high, and the league tried to market itself as a national product. It's a success to have lasted for over 20 years, but there were some major blunders. They forgot that you can't sell the AFL in a non-AFL city. They tried to market players as superstars, but you have to sell the teams and the game first. They used to do that, which is why New Orleans, Dallas, Orlando, and Tampa Bay were huge successes. Then ESPN started showing games a couple of years ago, and everything became about TONY GRAZIANI, CLINT DOLEZEL, SHANE STAFFORD!!!! They are all great arena ball quarterbacks, but you don't draw anybody by giving us those names. I'd rather hear "high-powered Philadelphia passing game vs. hard-hitting Orlando defense" as a selling point.

Not to sound like a homer, but the league pretty much died when the VooDoo folded. They were one of the most popular teams in the league. They could have survived as long as the league was still around, but Tom Benson (of all people!) knew that the league was in a downward spiral. He had nothing to gain by fielding a team for another year or two just to watch the league fall apart. So he got out. That was the sign, though. There's no point in putting a team - no matter how popular - into a league that was dying quickly.

AF2 will probably stick around because the salaries are much, much lower. As long as they don't make the same mistakes with AF2 that they did with the AFL, there's no reason that AF2 will go away anytime soon. So far, they're handling that league in the right way.

There's still a tiny bit of hope that the AFL will come back in 2011, but maybe I'm just dreaming. Oh well. I'm going to miss the 50-yard indoor war.

What about Michael Bishop?

Maybe this just raises the status of the Indoor Football League

Indoor Football League - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If that, and the AF2 survive, maybe somebody gets a TV contract.

Dude couldn't even stick in Grand Rapids. He's garbage. :)

Clint Dolezel....heh.


So does the AF2 become the AF1 now? How can they call themselves the AF2 when there is NO AF1 anymore? Just wondering...

:mad:

I assume they'll keep the AF2 name.

Anyway, the creator of arena football insists that the league is not dead: Foster, Kurz: AFL is not dead

Frankly, the reports of the league's death seemed a little premature to me. I mean, hell, the first mention of it over the weekend was from the Facebook page of some exiled Tampa Bay executive. It just snowballed from there. I'm not saying that it isn't true, but the whole media coverage got off to a shaky start right there.

I don't know what to believe right now, but it's pretty certain that there won't be an AFL season in 2010 at least.

"The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated" - Mark Twain

It's the only pro sports league with a patent. The league won't die. All of those IFL and AIFA cities would happily do whatever they could to get under the arena banner in some form or fashion.

The arena football brand has lots of recognition and that's a huge thing, so the Chapter 7 thing makes sense, but...there will be something that brings it back in some fashion at some point in the not-so-distant future, because people love football and like Pumpy alluded to, the game indoors has developed into a completely different code of gridiron football, with its own band of dedicated fans to the niche who will still want to see cheap diversions during the summer when there's no NFL or NCAA.

Pumpy, what if Colin White agreed to finance the AFL?

I'd introduce three bullets to my face. :(

With the problems Pumpy listed, I still don't get how they couldn't make it financially. Usually second tier leagues folded because of lack of attendance and no exposure. But the Arena league seemed to do well in both. They had a nice contract with ESPN that gave them great exposure and draw on average 13,000 fans a game. This isn't a CBA issue where 50 people were showing up to games and none were televised.

I personally was a much bigger fan of AF2. I thought indoor football should be for the smaller cities that can really build a loyal fanbase. The Iowa Barnstormers is the prototype in my mind. Won't make you a ton of money, but should consistently offer an opportunity to be profitible. While you might draw some more fans in Chicago, no one really gives a shit about the team. You aren't going to find people here wearing Rush jerseys and marking the calendars for home games.

If they wanted to become much bigger, I think they should have played in the Fall. Football is over after the Super Bowl in most people's minds. We need time to deflate from the playoffs and college bowls. We're just worn out. I thought they could run a 12 game season during the NFL and play their games on Friday nights. Target football fans who don't like high school football.

Just seems like this league should have succeeded. ESPN at your back and some pretty good attendance numbers.

The one season they let him play he became the first player to rush for 100 yds in a game and set the all-time single-season rushing record. ;)

He's a much better CFL quarterback anyway, as I'm sure MikeVic knows. Coaches may hate him because he probably scored a Wonderlic of about 10, but all he does is win (in the regular season at least).

This.
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Yes, I'm well aware of what Michael Bishop did for Grand Rapids, and I was mainly joking about him being garbage. The point was just to make fun of the Rampage because they were so terrible for a long stretch there. On the field, they reminded me a lot of the Oakland Raiders. A few individual players who were very good, but they didn't know how to win a football game. They were starting to turn that around, but I guess it doesn't matter anymore. :(

I went to a Rampage game once. I think they lost by 45 points or something.

Aha, so you like Michael Bishop!

That would have been a good night for the Rampage. They were horrible for a while.

Let's not get carried away, buddy!

Nah, he likes Colin White much, much more. ;)

The TV deals AFL had weren't money deals. They were simply "put us on TV for free at good times or whatever and you keep the ad revenue." As a result, that exposure was getting them to spend like a major league sport and like Pumpy said, to treat the game like it was about the individuals (second-tier players or about the owners) rather than about the brands themselves.

ESPN made shit worse. They bought a stake in the league and while the exposure was okay, it was all about Bon Jovi and the Philadelphia Soul or about other such things that had nothing to do with showcase the sport itself.

So it became a spectacle of casual fans, rather than a game anchored by people like Pumpy who love the game for what it is.

But that didn't kill it. Funnelling cash into it like it was a major league sport, without major league revenues coming in, is what did it. Never underestimate how much salaries can hurt a fledgling sports league. I mean, it killed hockey for an entire year. So it's not just relegated to second-tier sports, either.

Their season of post-Super Bowl to summer, is smart niche. Competing with the NFL would've been a bad idea and made the sport even less relevant than it already was/is.

It'll be back though, somehow...at some point.

Why not put a salary cap in or just have the owners say no to paying top dollar for players? Could no team find a way to balance their payroll with what they were making?

I didn't go to a Chicago Rush game. I did see the Milwaukee Mustangs back in high school a few times. They played at the Bradley Center and drew big numbers for games. Was always surprised that they folded since the city seemed to really like them. I also used to regularly go to La Crosse Night Train games back in college because I had a friend who played on the team. They were in the National Indoor Football League and I think switched to a league that folded.

Always thought the games were fun and exciting. The Milwaukee team had a PA announcer who would make fun of the other team and was quite funny.

So where is John Elway and Jon BonJovi in all this?

I kind of wish I had bought some SaberCats memorabilia so I could show my grandkids someday. I guess there's always Ebay.

BonJovi is such a POS. Not that I care for his music at all, might be one of the more overrated guys in history, but when they won, he promised the city of Philadelphia a free concert.

Did it ever happen? Of course not. The guy thought better of it and decided never to do it. A real class act.

The city of Philadelphia really supported the team. They rarely sold out, but they probably drew 15-17K a game.

There was a salary cap. In fact, earlier this year, the players were reportedly willing to allow the salary cap to be cut by 25% or more. By then, however, many of the owners wanted out. It was too late to save the league, really.

On top of that, what are the chances that all of the owners were going to essentially collude and decide to stop paying big bucks for a top quarterback? If San Jose and all the other top teams decided that they wouldn't pay big bucks to Mark Grieb (one of the best quarterbacks in AFL history), then one of the bad teams would snap him up. The league made some mistakes, but owners really did want to win. Unless you were New Orleans, Los Angeles, or Utah, you didn't get butts in the seats unless you won. So you don't say no to the top players if they're available. You're pretty much digging your own grave if you do that.

Also, as Dark Cloud has already mentioned, there wasn't any national television revenue to help the teams out financially. So unless you had a good contract with a local or regional network, you're living off gate receipts and merchandise sales. That wasn't working for most teams. Attendance wasn't growing, the league was marketed too poorly to attract new fans, and the television deal was crap. Throw all of that together and the league is hemorrhaging money no matter what.

It's a shame that the league did things right for so long, but then they made a wrong turn and everything went into the crapper. I'm not sure what led teams to start paying damn near $200,000 a year to some players, but it was impossible to get that genie back into the bottle, obviously.

Back!

More on the reconstituted AFL | ProFootballTalk.com

Seems like that is just a rebranding of AF2, which actually operated last year.

From what I've heard the NFL Network will air games.

I saw this morning that Hartford is getting a UFL team. Or something like that.

Well a few of the old top-tier teams have joined this one like Tampa Bay. A lot of the old AFL owners simply weren't going to come back to the new reconstituted league. They just couldn't rename it the same way because of the bankruptcy and of course, naming it the AFL would get them used.


It's the New York Sentinels moving to the stadium where UConn plays.

NFL Network will air AF1 games almost every Friday throughout the season. They are not airing a game on the Friday of NFL draft weekend due to draft coverage.

Arizona, Cleveland, Orlando, Tampa Bay, Dallas, Utah, and Chicago return from the AFL. Not bad at all. I'm pretty excited about this sport coming back, but honestly, I don't think it'll last more than a couple of years. In my opinion, the window of opportunity for national exposure has closed. Other small indoor leagues will remain, and they will be more or less OK. The owners in AF1 are going to feel a lot of pressure to sell their sport, though, and I think the public has essentially given up on it. I hope I'm wrong.

Why in the heck did the Dallas team change their team name/mascot? The Dallas Desperadoes was pretty badass...does it have something to do with the old owners owning the rights to that name or something?