So you are running a brand new football league made up of NFL retreads and undrafted college players.  You are planning on playing games on Thursday and Friday nights during the NFL season and you are trying to develop a fan following and bring people into stadiums in this troubled economy.  What do you do to try and make a statement, try to eke out a spot in the ever-increasing world of sport?  Well, there is a very interesting option that may or may not come into play.  Michael Vick was drafted by the Orlando franchise.

This brings up a very interesting question.  Is the media circus that is guaranteed to follow Vick good or bad for the league?  First, it is nowhere near a done deal that Vick would come play in the UFL.  He comes off of house arrest for the dogfighting charges sometime this month and the NFL commissioner will be making a determination if Vick is going to be suspended further.  If he is suspended by the NFL, the UFL commissioner would also need to make a ruling if he would be able to play for them.  Then there is the issue of Vick himself, if he even wants to come play in a “minor” league.  But that’s not what we’re talking about today.  Today, we look at the fundamental question of if the UFL should let Vick come play for them.

One thing that Vick brings immediately is publicity.  There is no question about that.  I can see the headlines right now: “Disgraced star to play in upstart league” and so on.  But with Vick would most certainly come a lot of negative publicity.  I’m sure that the PETA folks are going to be all over him, regardless of where he ends up playing.  Does the UFL really want that kind of press?  I think so.  For an upstart league, any publicity (with a few exceptions) is good publicity.  I don’t think that Vick will end up playing in the UFL.  For Vick, this could be an opportunity to show an NFL team that 2 years away from the game (in prison) hasn’t taken away from his abilities.

I have a hunch that Roger Goddell will let him back and the circus will follow him to the big leagues.  For the UFL though, I think they would love to have a chance to let him bring some attention to their league.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present you with the latest in a long line of “minor league” football– The UFL!  The United Football League is planning to kick off their season this October with franchises in New York, Orlando, San Francisco and Las Vegas. Billing themselves as a developmental league is not a bad plan, but competing with the “sanctity” of High School football by playing on Thursday and Friday nights may not be the best idea.  They did apparently get a national TV deal with the Thursday night games appearing on Versus.

To give them some credit, they did start off with some big names to coach their teams.  Jim Fassel will take the helm in Vegas, Jim Haslett will coach in Orlando, longtime Defensive Coordinator Ted Cotrell will be in New York, and in San Francisco… What’s that…?  It’s a Denny Green sighting!

So last night, the UFL decided to get together behind closed doors and have themselves a little draft.  They didn’t tell anyone when they were going to have their little secret get-together to divvy up has-been/never was NFL players and college grads who weren’t going to get a sniff in the NFL to begin with.  Retread coaches and retread players, sounds like a recipe for some fantastic football action! Probably the best known name to come out of the draft is former Chicago Bear and St. Louis Ram Adam Archuletta.  There had been some chatter that J.P. Lossman and Michael Vick would be involved in the draft, but it was not to be.  Denny Green had some interesting choices.  He loved coaching Larry Fitzgerald so much with the Cardinals, he drafted Larry’s little brother Marcus to play for him in San Fran.  He also picked our favorite AFL superstar Brett Dietz to play QB.  I can picture the first press conference.  “Brett Dietz is what we thought he was!”  Good times!

Over the next couple months as more players and more details about the league come out, be sure to tune in here for all the latest and greatest on the UFL.  After all, with College Football and the NFL, there certainly isn’t enough football going on in the fall!

]]> http://stillfootball.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/if-you-have-a-draft-and-nobody-knows-about-it-did-it-really-happen/feed/ 1 chicagobronco UFL Denny Green http://stillfootball.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/guest-post-exploring-the-cifl-minor-minor-league-football/ http://stillfootball.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/guest-post-exploring-the-cifl-minor-minor-league-football/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:31:12 +0000 JM http://stillfootball.wordpress.com/?p=740 ]]>

Yes, the AFL is twisting in the wind, and despite rumors the league will return in some form for 2010, what is the wacky-indoor-football fan to do in the interim? One of our regular readers, known to you as Mr. jcompton, caught a CIFL game and filed the following report.

Football with seven men? This is madness!

What’s an AFL fan to do this year? Why, avail himself of the hometown, expansion, second-tier indoor football team playing down the road, of course! Up in Madison, Wisconsin, we’re fortunate enough to have a new indoor team, the Wisconsin Wolfpack of the CIFL. The CIFL is better known as “The league with the Chicago team currently fielding a bunch of ex-Rush guys slaughtering the other seven teams.” I was part of an intimate gathering watching the Wolfpack beat the Rock River Raptors, 50-23.

I don’t know precisely how or why the Wolfpack got started, but I do know that their playing field used to belong to the Pensacola Barracudas, a defunct AF2 team. The AF2 logo is still at midfield and the Barracudas logo is still in the end zone. They’re a bit smudged, like somebody spent a few minutes scrubbing at it with turpentine, then said “This is second-tier minor league indoor football—why am I breaking my back?” and gave up.

At a generous guess, I’d say there were maybe 1300 people in the stands, in a stadium with capacity for 10,000+. It’s hard to say whether this being Final Four night hurt ticket sales, as the stands looked pretty empty in the photos from the Wolfpack’s only other home game to date. The fans in the stands were certainly thinking basketball, though—when the PA announcer broke the news of Michigan State’s win, he got arguably the biggest roar of the night. (Big Ten solidarity?) In any case, I got fine seats just walking up to the box office window 20 minutes before kickoff.

The CIFL plays like the AFL, except for two important details. It’s seven-man football instead of eight-man (more on this in a minute), and there are no end zone nets. When off-brand indoor leagues started popping up in the late 90s, they played without nets because Jim Foster patented the nets and the AFL (and later AF2) was the sole authorized user of the patent. The patent has since expired, but leagues like the CIFL continue to play without nets. This presumably is because it costs actual money to build and store a big freaking iron net apparatus. On the other hand, Menards probably charges about $25 for the parts you need to assemble the open-air, U-shaped hanging goal posts used by the Wolfpack, so Menards gets their $25 and the CIFL gets no nets.

The nets are what make AFL kickoffs exciting. The ball might bounce shallow, it might clang off the iron and skitter out to the 10. Craziness ensues. A lot of times guys run 40 yards side-to-side in their end zones before going down and taking a touchback. Good stuff. But the CIFL, like the AFL, penalizes a kick drilled out of the back of the end zone on the fly—the receiving team gets it at the 25. And the Coliseum has a huge basketball scoreboard exactly in the way of a typical rainbow kickoff you might drop into the opposing end zone—hitting it is also a procedure penalty, ball goes to the receiving team at the 25. So both kickers were reduced to pooching knucklers which were returned near or past midfield almost every time. The seven-man squad seemed to favor the receiving team—either that, or special teams play was atrocious. Kickoffs should be exciting opportunities for infrequent big plays, not just a formality to get 20 yards from the other guy’s end zone.

Kickoff struggles aside, it was a fine evening of off-off-brand football. With little need for advertiser timeouts, the whole game was wrapped up in just over two hours. The fans were less engaged with the team’s overall performance as with a few local standouts (lots of the players are from the UW family of football colleges, natch) but that’s not too surprising for a new team in a small league with little at stake. There was a decent scattering of impressive runs, hard hits, and one-handed grabs. Schlocky fan participation games were played on the field during breaks, with the usual goony props (“wear this hamburger suit”, “get drunk guys dizzy and have them try to kick a field goal”, etc.) T-shirts were thrown into the stands. The eight-girl dance squad looked like your average crop-topped troupe and danced their hearts out a couple of times. (The dancers also prowled the stands at one point selling 50/50 raffle tickets, which seemed tacky.)

With the AFL down and possibly out, it’s either the netless, low-frills, seven-man CIFL, or a 90-minute shot down I-94 to Milwaukee to watch their new AF2 team. The Iron seems to want real money for tickets. So I think it’s gonna be me and the Wolfpack for a little while longer.

The good:

• It was $31 for two tickets and parking. Maybe not the world’s best value in a night’s entertainment, but not bad for a football game.

• The Wolfpack front office published a handy 12-page PDF full of player stats and notes before the game, which made for a free print-at-home game program. It was a nice bit of professional polish, marred ever so slightly by typos, odd grammar, and at least one missing key player, a starting defensive lineman wearing #19. There’s got to be a good story behind that, either “I used to be a QB and then I got huge”, or “The team’s only spare, clean jersey was #19.”

• I really didn’t know what to expect out of the officiating—the officials were not introduced pregame, which I didn’t take as a great sign. But they didn’t seem to be a problem. The flags were disproportionately thrown against the Raptors, but I didn’t see any egregious non-calls in favor of the home team.

• Two guys got shaken up, but neither suffered a crippling injury. You never want to see a player hurt in any sport at any level, blah blah blah, but getting a life-altering injury for a $200ish game check would be the worst of the worst.

The bad:

• There’s no getting around the fact that arenaball defense is hard, but it’s beginning to look like Rock River’s defensive players may not be very good even for arenaball. The Raptors just signed a new defensive coordinator, who accurately sniffed out most of WI’s running plays (shouting “RUN! RUN!” at his players before the snap), but it seemed that the Wolfpack still managed to pick up at least 5 yards anyway.

• The Wolfpack’s early lead and the Raptors’ failure to mount any sort of comeback sucked a lot of the energy out of the crowd. The size and the lack of a lot of passionate emotions over arenaball rivalries didn’t help the tension, either. It’s fun to watch your home team win, but it was so lopsided that it came off dull.

• SI’s Dr. Z has long railed against petty timeouts in a foregone conclusion. This game was lousy with them. Needing four scores, the Raptors were taking timeouts on defense with less than a minute to play. Big comebacks are possible in arenaball, but as the Raptors hadn’t attempted an onside kick all game long, they didn’t seem to be terribly serious about a comeback bid. So they burned their timeouts and the Wolfpack got a first down anyway. Game over, right? No, the Wolfpack said “back atcha!” and called a timeout of their own. After one more end zone attempt, the team decided against further stupidity and just let the clock expire.

• No nets and lame kickoff play. See above.

Unanswered questions:

• Why in the world is the CIFL’s web forum set to members-only? Are they trying to keep out some undesirable element of rowdy second-tier indoor football fans? They should be so lucky!

• I realize this is not the multibillion-dollar stakes of the NFL, MLB, or NCAA here, but how does any league think it’s a good idea for the same man to own two teams in the same division? Bob Lowe owns both the Wolfpack and the Raptors. Yikes.

• Can the CIFL finish the season without drama? League champions have a habit of desertion, and one of the teams this year is a hastily-resurrected, “mostly-traveling” team that already couldn’t pull off one of its measly three scheduled home contests this season.

• The AF2 Barracudas haven’t played since 2002. Has that field surface been in storage for the past six years, or has it bounced from upstart minor indoor team to upstart minor indoor team like a bad penny? Either way—in all that time, nobody’s managed to get the logos off the turf? Seriously?

• Is the Wolfpack a tremendously Zen football outfit, or do they not have much time for proofreading? The organization also runs a semi-pro outdoor team, whose player application form judges a player’s quicks by his “40-year time.”

Really, guys? Aw, hell.

Announcement to come later today, apparently. The good news is, maybe we can get our hands on some cheap gear?

P.S. This doesn’t affect the af2, so, if you’re really looking for some sloppy indoor football… well, you might want to seek professional help first.

UPDATE: Yes, indeed, Operation Shutdown is in effect. From the league office:

We remain grateful to the greatest fans in the world for their avidity and their patience. It is with them in mind that the AFL, its owners and its players remain committed to resuming play as soon as it is feasible.

I’m not even interested in figuring out who or what to blame. So, I blame us, It’s Still Football, for not mocking hard enough last season.

Oh, and the economy. I also blame the economy.

Should’ve thought of explaining the league’s (please not) death throes thusly. [The Sports Complex]

Aieeeee! It's just like Pitcairn Island!

Oh, dear Christ. We get bored and wander off for several months, and our “beloved” league is in jeopardy? We figured it was the idle chatter of a few of the we-blogs, and perhaps there was some financial difficulty … wait, where’d the VooDoo go? Well, that’s just Tom Benson, and he’s kind of a dick. The league is as sturdy as one of my favorite Chicago institutions, The Tribune Company. Oh, it’s not? Oh, crap. The Predators, sold? What are the guys we met in New Orleans going to do with their scary masks? Terrorize children [more often]?

You’ll tell me it’s all going to be okay, right, San Jose Mercury News? Gak. “WE WILL TAKE ON ALL COMERS, FOR WE ARE INDESCRIBABLY WEALTHY,” is the campaign for the 2009 SaberCats, by the way. But what of The Dietz?  Certainly the Storm…

Despite reports of AFL troubles, Storm plods along

A ringing endorsement from the St. Petersburg Times-adjacent tampabay.com.

What happened? Well, until I can get a detailed analysis from our in-house economist, let’s use broad strokes: David Baker’s AFL was growing, and had a deal with ESPN that was supposed to secure the league’s future. He left us. Heleftusheleftusheleftus. Lex-from-Jurassic-Park interlude over, the VooDoo crumble with little-to-no-notice. A deal with A Mysterious Equity Group falls apart. Talks, dispersal draft, and free agency are all postponed. No schedule?

Boned, boned, boned. Where are our cut-rate Woodward and Bernstein to follow the money? Where’d it go? Did the league expand too quickly under Baker, only to collapse like a dying star? A star that was interesting, but never really that bright in the first place? Colorado is one of the teams facing awkwardness, and they’ve been one of the sturdier teams, owned by John Elway. If Elway’s hurting, everybody’s hurting.

Dammit.

We don’t write for a while, and this is what it takes to put fingers to keys?

At least we didn’t come back for an epitaph.

Yet.

::Sigh:: TMZ, do you have to take a shot at the AFL? You kneecap the national discourse daily with your irregular journalism, and yet you’re still able to locate a high horse from which you can make statements like “the most pointless title in footballdom?” Isn’t there a model or starlet you can drive to drugs or an eating disorder? Pick on someone of your own douchevolume. [TMZ.com]

It’s Here! Today! We’re going CoverItLive-style, and you know what that means: no embedding! Following links! Extreme laziness!

Who will take home the Kraken of professional sports trophies? San Jose or Philadelphia? I know I predicted San Jose, but I really want to see Bon Jovi hoist this thing with his spindly arms.

Keep in the care of this guy? No. Hell no.

To follow the liveblogging extravaganza follow the mighty link: TO THE LIVE BLOG!

This Guy? Maybe.

This Guy? Could Be...

In a surprise move two days before the Arena Bowl, and one year after signing a contract extension, Commissioner David Baker resigned his post for reasons… mysterious.

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I never thought I would do this for the rest of my life,” Baker told The Associated Press. “The league has never been stronger … it gives me the opportunity to look into doing other things.”

…

“There’s a lot of great opportunities for this league.” Baker said. “So this is a good time for me. If I didn’t go now, there would be no other career for David Baker.

“Like my good friend John Elway, I am going out on top.”

Bullshit. If it doesn’t turn out that he was called back to Saltfjellet by Hrungnir, King of All The Mountain Giants, I’m calling shenanigans on this whole thing. Because a world where Commissioner Hagrid resigns because he’s bored, and not because he must take part in a 10,000-year-old ancestral tradition of hewing forests, draining lakes, and piloting the mighty glaciers themselves is not a world in which I want to live.

Nevertheless, fans and employees of the Arena Football League owe David Baker a debt of gratitude for the last 12 years of work, which saw consistent growth in team value and visibility, a shocking increase in media coverage (thanks, Worldwide Leader!), and the ability to mock the leadership of every other sport. Bud Selig, Roger Goodell, David Stern, and especially that troll Gary Bettman should thank their lucky stars they no logner have to be shown up by the commissioner of a second-tier sport in professionalism, fan-friendliness, and the ability to crush coal into diamonds.

It’s Still Football wishes Mr. Baker the best, and would be remiss in neglecting to mention that meeting the guy last year was insanely great. We also might have been inebriated. But that shouldn’t detract from the fact that we were duly impressed by his magnificence

I hope he still takes care of all the Arena Bowl XXII pomp and circumstance, because it’d just feel weird to have Ed Policy hand over the 10-Ton Foster Trophy.

Godspeed, You Titan; You Showed Us How a 7'6" Bazillionaire Should Act

I stole ESPN's Banner. I am a winner.

So, guess what? Between general apathy and real-life nonsense, we totally blew off the playoffs (which apparently were hosted in Crazy Town, final results notwithstanding), and aren’t going to New Orleans again. For which my liver thanks the Flying Spaghetti Monster. BUT ANALYSIS WILL ENSUE!

ALL HAIL.

Multiple members of Bon Jovi! Jaws! More Cowbell! The Grieb Laser Industry! Darren Arbet! The Guy Who Owns Fry’s! D’Orazio! SOME OTHER PEOPLE OHMYGODIT’STHEARENABOWL!

Dear Point-Counterpoint, I never thought this could happen to me… (Jump?)

ARENA BOWL XXII. NEW ORLEANS, LA. Sunday, July 27, 2008 2:00 CDT. A-B-Frickin’-C

After the dispatching of pretenders Cleveland and Grand Rapids, Philadelphia and San Jose go toe-to-toe, nose-to-nose, fist-to-fist, groin-to-groin (too much? Okay.) on Sunday afternoon to determine once and for all whose cuisine reins supreme. And by “cuisine,” I, of course mean “series of ‘get open’ plays.”

TC SAYS: Look, I’ve exhibited gross negligence in the last few months in terms of paying appropriate attention to this Sport of Kings*, but if there are several things I know, it’s that Darren Arbet could steal Billy Dee Williams’ women, Mark Grieb can burn holes in saplings with his stare, and all San Jose does is quietly win games. AJ Haglund has the same last name as Miss America, but is about two and a half feet shorter. He’s actually in this video, just beneath Miss America’s left elbow. That being said, Philadelphia is loaded and old, and if they don’t win Sunday, they’re kind of boned in terms of getting back to this lofty perch as champions of the Mitsubishi National Conference of Mitsubishi Motorcars. D’Orazio has shown why he already has a ring, and Chris Jackson is third-rail electric. (Right? Somebody help me, here.) On defense… the Soul, from what I understand, has a d-line that deserves the adjective “stout”. Please God, Joe, elaborate on the defenses.

J SAYS: Goodness, I would, if only we weren’t talking about Arena Football, good sir.  The biggest story of the day for sure is the fact that general go-to San Jose WR James Roe due to what is referred to as Old Man’s Veteran’s Knee. On the other side of the field, Former Homer Favorite Matt D’Orazio has a) legs b) Chris “The Aforementioned” Jackson, and c) Larry “Chicks Dig the Long Ball” Brackins. I know San Jose’s long been a favorite of TC’s, but their D will have to play their best game in, say, over a year.

THE BOTTOM LINE: (TC) If the loss of James Roe (MCL EXPLOSION) can be overlooked, I’m going to do it. Philly’s going to have to go balls-out to rattle Grieb, and eventually he’s going to take advantage of a mismatch brought about by Gamblor, the god of rushing 4 and jumping routes. Philadelphia has to be bold to win, San Jose just has to play their game. (J) That is, on both sides of the ball, better than Philadelphia plays. If I were a betting man, I’d be throwing in my lot with the majority of readers clamoring for Sesame Street DVDs. Philly hit the ground running this season and kept in stride, San Jose made it to the playoffs in no small part to a pathetically weak division wherein only 3 of 8 teams won at least half of their games.

TC’s PREDICTION: Back-and-forth for three quarters = probable. 68-63, San Jose defends their title.

J’s PREDICTION: It’s always sunny in Philadelphia. Soul 68, Saber Cats 42. Bon Jovi gives that free concert he promised.

*Not actually the sport of Kings. The sport of lower-level Earls?