FOOTBALL, CONTINUED

                By the evening of February 3, aka Super Bowl Sunday, most of us will have had enough of football for a few months, but for those who haven’t help will be at hand. Just six days later, on February 9, something called the Alliance of American Football will make its debut, beginning a 14-week run including playoffs. 

                There already is a “spring” pro-football circuit called the Arena Football League, but because its games are played indoors and on a 50-yard field with eight-man teams, it’s really football with an asterisk. The AAF will be football in the sense it is usually understood.

                The new league’s games will be staged in eight cities, all in the South or West where any weather problems shouldn’t (but still might) be severe. They are Atlanta, Ga., Birmingham, Ala., Memphis, Tenn., Orlando, Fla., Phoenix, Ariz., Salt Lake City, Utah, San Antonio, Tex., and San Diego, Calif. It will play a 10-week regular schedule followed by two weeks of playoffs involving the top four teams.

 Although there is no such formal designation, it will be a football minor league, its rosters peopled by athletes who aren’t judged ready for prime time, or no longer are. The standard contract will pay $250,000 to any player who spends three years in the league, or about $83,000 per. That’s in contrast to the average National Football League salary of about $2.1 million, or median of about $860,000, so the two leagues won’t compete on that score. The AAF has a television commitment from CBS, meaning that its near-term survival shouldn’t be an issue. If any sports entity might consider it to be competition it would be the NBA or NHL, and one suspects they won’t be too worried.

Nonetheless, the AAF inevitably will be measured against such insurgent football leagues past as the All-American Football Conference (1946-49), the American Football League (1960-69), the United States Football League (1983-85) and the XFL, wrestling impresario Vince McMahon’s cartoonish loop that died after one season (2001) but is threatening to be reborn in 2020. The first three of the above-named enterprises also are generally recalled with derision, but shouldn’t be. Two of them made lasting impressions on the professional game and the third survives as a thorn in the saddle of the established league.

You have to be about my age (80) to remember the All-American Conference first hand; I recall going to a Chicago Rockets’ game at which about 5,000 people populated the 100,000-seat Soldier Field, most of them forming thong-like strips up the 50-yard lines. The AAFC was a financial failure, its main sin being prematurity at a time when the football pie was a sliver of what it is today, but the league brought the pro game to new cities and three of its teams-- the Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Colts—were taken into the NFL when it folded. Indeed, its Browns immediately became the game’s best team upon joining the NFL in 1950, winning titles that year and in 1954 and ’55.

The American Football League had its zany aspects getting started in 1960 but solidified itself after a few seasons and eventually forced a full-scale merger with the NFL, increasing that league’s size to 26 teams from 16 starting with the 1970 campaign. The Green Bay Packers of the older league won the first two interleague championship games in 1967 and ’68 (the game wasn’t called the Super Bowl until later), but since then parity has set in, with each conference winning 25 times.

The USFL started as a spring league, and had big-league aspirations, but lasted just three campaigns. Its demise came when its anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL was decided in its favor but resulted in an award of just $1, upped to $3 after treble damages were applied. The USFL lives on through the animosity of one of its team owners, Donald Trump, who suffered a bruised ego when his attempt to come out of the wreckage with an NFL franchise was rebuffed. He’s taken potshots at the NFL since, their affect amplified by his present position.

The AAF has dealt with the nutsy-owner problem by making all its teams league-owned. Its founders are Charlie Ebersol, who has a TV background, and Bill Polian, the former, highly regarded general manager of the Buffalo Bills. Other exNFLers, including players, have executive roles in the organization.

The league’s biggest names going in are coaches: football lifers Mike Singletary, Steve Spurrier, Rick Neuheisel, Dennis Erickson and Mike Martz all will guide AAF entrants. The league already has had player tryouts and drafts and has a “notable players” tab on its website, but I didn’t recognize any names on it and so will not pass any along.  The NFL talent net has holes, meaning that some pretty good players will have slipped through to the AAF, but we’ll have to wait until it plays a few games to learn who they are. 

Much of the initial interest in the league has come from the rules changes it has adopted. Shooting for a time frame of 150 minutes a game, against the NFL’s 180-plus, it has eliminated TV timeouts and shrunk the number of other commercial breaks. Time between plays has been reduced to 30 seconds from 40.

There will be no kickoffs; the “receiving” team will begin play at its own 25-yard-line after scores and at the game’s beginning and start of the second half. Instead of onside kicks a team wishing to get the ball back after it scores will have a 4^th-and-10 opportunity from its own 35-year line. If it makes it it continues, if not it turns over the ball where its play ended.

 Extra points will be two-point plays from scrimmage. Head injuries will be assessed by sideline physicians not working for the league or its teams, a really good move. Single-game tickets will sell for $20 and five-game season packages for $75, both amounts reasonable by any standard.

It’s a shame that the new league didn’t choose to monkey with the game further with an eye to opening it up, like the Canadian League has. Adopting the college game’s 15-yard penalties for pass-interference calls also would have been good. Still, its version should be worth a look or maybe two.  Our sports schedule is crowded but I guess there’s room for a bit more.