They’re not going to be on broadcast TV normally? That’s what’s going to kill them right there.
I watched pretty much all of two games this weekend. My impressions…
- It fills the weekend sports void for me until Baseball starts. This time of year I pretty much just watch College Hockey and they usually don’t play on Sunday.
- It moved fast. Not just the shorter play clock but the “No TV Timeouts” rule as well. After one team scored they next team ran their 1st and 10 play less than a minute later. That was pleasant.
- Biggest difference in talent was the WRs dropped too many catchable passes.
- Birmingham’s QB Luis Perez was fun to watch. He dropped one sweet 30 yard pass over the outside shoulder of his receiver on a sideline route.
- It was funny watching coaches challenge calls only to discover the replay videos weren’t near NFL quality. Hard to tell if a pass hit the ground when all you see a a vague blur. I suspect we’ll see far fewer challenges going forward when they realize it’s simply hard to tell on most plays when you only have two cameras.
- I love getting rid of extra points so every touchdown is followed by a two point play.
- I understand they use the “one foot inbound” rule on a catch. NFL should do that too so NCAA and NFL are using the same standard. I’m not going to argue about an extra catch or two every week because of it.
- I like the idea of replacing onside kicks with the kicking team getting the ball “4th and 12” from their own 28. That’s a reasonable substitution for on side kicks if you’re going to get rid of kickoffs.
- After destroying at least one Fantasy Football team for me, I had fun rooting against Trent Richardson and watching him cough up a fumble. Lots of other recognizable NFL and NCAA names playing and coaching.
- I understand there actually is some level of affiliation between NFL teams and AAF teams. Something like if the Patriots cut a player then Birmingham has first dibs on claiming him before anyone else in the AAF can. Even if this doesn’t mean that much it gives NFL fans a rooting interest. I know my son was cheering for Birmingham because he’s a Patriots fan.
Doesn’t look like it. They’ll be on cable (CBS Sports Network, NFL Network, and TNT), and a couple of streaming options. It also looks like their championship game will be on CBS.
The Wikipedia article suggests that the teams may also be running on local-market broadcast stations, but it’s not clear to me.
Maybe. The NFL Network will broadcast two games per week. CBS Sports Network will show one game per week. You can livestream any game that’s not on the CBS Sports Network. So games will be somewhat accessible. But yeah, obviously having a game every week on CBS would have been ideal.
You can only rush a max of five guys and no blitzing from the secondary. This usually means teams have a standard four down men and then they send a linebacker. Although sometimes they have a fifth guy on the line, to which then you can’t send anyone else additional.
That’s the rule. How teams kept getting called for it I haven’t the faintest. One of the downsides to the game being so fast is there is no room for replay so there is even less room for analysis. I mean, if you’re a D-coordinator and you know the rule, then, you know, don’t send more than five guys? Don’t blitz a safety? The reason for the rule is for safety an also because the players aren’t as good the QBs would be getting killed every down.
Did anyone see the AAF app? They are able to live track all the players so they have an interactive fantasy game where you pick the play and its result. Unfortunately the app doesn’t have anywhere to see stats…
Which was the point of my post. Minor leagues struggle to succeed. The other minor leagues are all in cooperation with their parent leagues, but are largely dependent upon major league subsidies, or are extremely unstable, and sometimes are unstable even with a formal relationship with the bigs. It’s just the nature of the North American market.
Competing with or against the big league isn’t really the point; the XFL played at almost exactly the same time as the AAF does, starting only after the Super Bowl, so in no way that matters were they competing directly with the NFL. The USFL played in spring and summer - they were a bit more open about being a rival league, trying to compete for real players, but again it was not a head to head contest. People just didn’t care about minor league football.
It’s not impossible to succeed, obviously. It’s really, really hard, though.
The AAF has another thing going for it, though - the teams aren’t franchises. A common theme in many failed leagues is that the leagues are doomed by a lack of unity among the various owners. Getting eight, twelve or eighteen egotistical millionaires to agree of anything is like herding particularly willful cats. The USFL, contrary to how people tend to remember it today, had a pretty good first season and might have done something had they stuck to its founders’ plan, which included strict salary caps and regional drafts. Instead, the various owners starting blowing their wads on star players, causing an arms race and unsustainable costs. You’ll also end up with a few duds among your millionaire owners, finding out only after the fact that they’re not as rich as you hoped, and a franchise or three folds or moves and the league looks like a Mickey Mouse operation.
The AAF has no franchises, only league-owned teams, thus eliminating all those risks and headaches.
Very few new leagues have the ability to convince broadcast TV folks to broadcast their games. The first week being on CBS was something of a coup in and of itself.
I had interpreted "free TV’ as meaning broadcast TV or basic cable, when maybe I shouldn’t have.
Still… I don’t think that limited viewability is going to do them any favors in the long run.
And what else are the TV networks going to show in the meantime that would out-rate it? Pro/college basketball and maybe early baseball games (although I have my doubts) are about it.
That’s for sure. But, whaddya gonna do? You can’t force the networks to carry it at gunpoint.
Universal streaming is the likely future for this sort of thing.
Well, for this kind of thing, there is a baseline number of viewers you need to make it worth carrying instead of a rerun or poker or whatever.
Good point.
I’d think the best thing they could do is whatever they need to for official recognition as the NFL’s minor league/developmental league.
That way, they could slap the NFL brand on stuff, and a lot of skeptical fans might be willing to give it a fair shake, as it’s “official”, versus some kind of off-brand football a-la the XFL (either incarnation)
That worked great for the WLAF.
16 years isn’t exactly terrible.
I think that to some degree any developmental league has the handicap of having what amount to also-ran players versus the main league’s players. They probably would need to take a page from the minor leagues in baseball and hockey, as well as the European lower-level soccer teams and figure out how to best make it work.
One thing I’d think they could do well with is to put their franchises in areas that’s not near any NFL teams and if possible, not near major power 5 colleges either. San Antonio is probably a good example- the closest NFL team would be Houston, and the closest Power 5 college program would be UT in Austin, 80 or so miles away. A terrible place would be somewhere like say… Columbus, OH. It’s within 160 miles of four NFL teams, and is the hometown of one of the premier college football programs. Any minor league football team is going to look shabby by comparison.
It seems like part of their initial strategy has been, in fact, to place franchises in areas (if not actual cities) with strong college football followings – Birmingham, for example, has a team in large part because of how Alabamians avidly follow the teams from the University of Alabama and Auburn University. It also looks like they’re initially trying to make sure that their teams have players from the local colleges, to add some fan recognition and interest.
I am not sure if it’s that they want those fans so much as they need the high quality stadium the existence of fans means will be there. High quality facilities means so much to a sports team. The AAF has managed to locate itself in some reasonably high quality stadia.
Sure, but wasn’t one of the WLAF’s contentions that the US teams didn’t do well because nobody wanted to watch guys play who couldn’t make the NFL?
Having high quality stadia isn’t going to be much of a selling point if people are going to continually compare your games to the “big” leagues.
IMO, what they need to do is try to make the games more than just a football game- make them events where people can show up, hang around for a few hours, eat, watch football, see a band or two, etc… And make tickets cheap - it’s essentially second-rate play, so charge a second-rate fee. Even at $15 for the cheap seats, I think that’s too high.
Tickets in Orlando are $100 except in the end zones.
No.
Wow. Is that face value, or is that what resellers / brokers are charging?
Let me back up. That was for their opening game only. Now that’s only the price for the home sideline, otherwise they’re $63, $45, and down to $20 in GA. A bit of realism seems to have set in.
Maybe. But they’re still a bunch of rejects.
IMO, the AAF needs to charge ticket prices in the same ball park as a minor league baseball team or maybe major league cheap seats.
That’s their main competition on a spring/summer weekend for people to attend sporting events- they have to make their games more attractive to people than that, and if there’s a major league baseball team in town, they also have to compete with the idea that they could go see major league baseball vs. dev-league football.
$63 sounds pretty steep to me to watch the minors.