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 by Elvis
6 years 3 months ago
 Total posts:   41510  
 Joined:  Mar 28 2015
United States of America   Los Angeles
Administrator

dieterbrock wrote:It’s really disgraceful that they pull the plug this week. League was going to have some legit exposure. I feel bad for these guys who were busting their ass to play.


Thing is, it seems it's not "they," it's just this one dude Dunlon. Reporting is everyone else is pissed, disagrees with what he's doing and are questioning his right to do it, but maybe that's just CYA posturing...

 by dieterbrock
6 years 3 months ago
 Total posts:   11512  
 Joined:  Mar 31 2015
United States of America   New Jersey
Hall of Fame

Elvis wrote:Thing is, it seems it's not "they," it's just this one dude Dunlon. Reporting is everyone else is pissed, disagrees with what he's doing and are questioning his right to do it, but maybe that's just CYA posturing...

That’s what it sounds like for sure, that he was only in it to get the intel on the gambling app. But the reality is that the league was on life support when they brought him in not too long ago.

 by Elvis
6 years 3 months ago
 Total posts:   41510  
 Joined:  Mar 28 2015
United States of America   Los Angeles
Administrator

https://www.ocregister.com/2019/04/02/a ... -football/

AAF suspends operations after just 8 weeks of football

The Alliance of American Football loses financial backing from billionaire investor and AAF chairman Tom Dundon

By RYAN KARTJE | [email protected] | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: April 2, 2019 at 12:23 pm | UPDATED: April 2, 2019 at 1:45 pm

The Alliance of American Football, the upstart spring league that sought to fill the void where so many other alternative football leagues have failed, has suspended operation after just eight weeks.

The AAF, which debuted in early February to better-than-expected ratings, had hoped to eventually secure a formal player-sharing agreement with the NFL to function as an official developmental league. But what began as a long-term vision for a partnership was sped up considerably over the past two weeks by billionaire investor and AAF chairman Tom Dundon.

Dundon, who became chairman when he committed in February to invest $250 million in the league, warned last week in comments made to USA Today that the league could fold, “if the (NFL) players union is not going to give us young players.”

The NFLPA, citing player health concerns, wasn’t swayed. On Tuesday, with no deal secured, Dundon pulled the remainder of his investment, and the AAF ceased operation, stunning many within and around the league. An AAF source said the decision, made solely by Dundon, was not supported by the league’s co-founders.

Last month, one of those co-founders, former NFL executive Bill Polian, said Dundon’s initial investment would “provide us with long-term stability, three, four years down the road.” At the time, Polian also suggested that discussions of a developmental partnership with the NFL were “ramping up.”

But none of the AAF’s brain trust, aside from Dundon, appeared distressed by the lack of a deal at this early juncture. In an interview with the Southern California News Group last month, AAF co-founder Charlie Ebersol shrugged off the notion that the league needed a specific deal to develop players for the NFL. The AAF, he pointed out, already devised an out for its players’ contracts to allow for them to jump to the NFL. He described the league’s relationship with the NFL as “deep-seeded and real”.

“Ultimately, with or without a relationship with the NFL, we’re a developmental league for the NFL,” Ebersol said.

Dundon, who also owns the Carolina Hurricanes, apparently did not see it that way. By pulling out of the deal, Dundon will forfeit at least $70 million that he invested in the league up front.

Without his investment, the AAF will almost certainly shudder with just two weeks remaining in its inaugural regular season, joining a long line of other alternative football leagues that have quickly failed. The XFL lasted just one season, before folding in 2001, while the USFL fell apart in 1986 after attempting to compete with the NFL. Several other leagues, including a new version of the XFL, are planning to launch within the next year.

While the AAF hasn’t officially folded yet, the chances of securing an investment large enough to stay afloat are slim. Just paying remaining player salaries would require a reported $2.9 million per week.

Ebersol, a documentary filmmaker and son of legendary NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol, teamed up with Polian in 2017 with an idea to create a league that was complementary, as opposed to competitive, with the NFL. The eight-team league experimented with new rules, including eliminating kickoffs, changing onside strategy and using an additional SkyJudge referee, which could overturn calls on the field.

The AAF also sought to tap into the increasing demand for interactivity, as well as the rise of sports betting. The league’s app and tracking technology, Ebersol noted, was the main driver of investments until the league began in early February.

Once it finally kicked off, Ebersol said, the AAF’s success in the face of past failures would be determined solely by the quality of football. But the league faced a litany of non-football issues from the start. Prior to Dundon’s investment, player payments were delayed several days — an issue the league later blamed on switching payroll systems. There were insurance issues in Florida and a lawsuit filed against Ebersol and the AAF, alleging he’d cut a business partner out of the league. Then, last month, the AAF then decided on a whim to move its April championship game from Las Vegas to Frisco, Texas, despite the fact that tickets had already been sold.

But amid this apparent turmoil, the league’s ratings remained relatively steady. With games broadcast on CBS, NFL Network and TNT, the league’s TV audience for games often ranged between 300,000 and 400,000 viewers — a farcry from the 3.25 million that watched its debut weekend, but otherwise a reasonable total. In-stadium attendance, meanwhile, fluctuated greatly depending on the team. San Antonio led the league in attendance by a wide margin, with an average paid attendance of nearly 28,000 per game, while Salt Lake managed an average paid attendance just above 9,000.

“This is what everyone who’s done this before has learned,” Ebersol said in March. “You can have big media partners, and you can have big names. You can have all the marketing money in the world. But at the end of the day, if your product isn’t excellent, if it isn’t professional grade, then all of that is irrelevant.”

But after eight weeks, not even a good product could save the latest attempt at a spring football league from a premature demise.

 by Elvis
6 years 3 months ago
 Total posts:   41510  
 Joined:  Mar 28 2015
United States of America   Los Angeles
Administrator

https://www.ocregister.com/2019/04/05/a ... -football/

AAF goes under: Inside the sudden collapse of the Alliance of American Football
Says one team president after cleaning out his desk: 'We made a deal with the devil'


By Ryan Kartje | [email protected] | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: April 5, 2019 at 10:00 am | UPDATED: April 5, 2019 at 10:01 am

SAN DIEGO — Three weeks before the Alliance of American Football suspended operations against his wishes, confounding league officials and leaving stunned employees and players stranded and reeling, Charlie Ebersol stood on the sideline at SDCCU Stadium in a blue AAF windbreaker, reveling in the roar of the crowd.

It had been Ebersol’s vision to start a spring football league, one that might complement the NFL instead of compete with it, and in a matter of a year, he’d built one, complete with eight teams, more than 400 players and a slew of major media partners.

“Everyone seems to forget that in the stories,” Ebersol told the Southern California News Group in March. “We built this league from absolutely nothing. No company behind us, no marketing agency, none of that. Built from scratch.”

But beneath that proud facade, the league’s foundation was cracking. A deal with billionaire investor Tom Dundon meant to bail out the AAF was already becoming its undoing. Team budgets had been slashed to nothing. Bills were left unpaid. Before long, the nascent league would crumble, leaving many who trusted the vision of Ebersol and his co-founders feeling misled and angry. Most still don’t understand exactly why the AAF shuttered. The league’s brass, meanwhile, place the blame firmly on Dundon.

“We started out with a vision that we all believed in,” said Jeff Garner, president of the San Diego Fleet. “We were told – just like our partners were told, our players were told, our coaches were told – that we had funding for three years and that we were going to take a long-term approach to this. We knew we were going to lose money up front, but we were going to focus on the football and the fan experience. That’s what we were told. But an investor backed out, and we made a deal with the devil.”

That night in San Diego, as the Birmingham Iron lined up for a game-winning field goal, no one had any idea the AAF would never return here. The Fleet had struggled to find a foothold in Year 1, often leaving large swaths of open seats in this massive stadium. But now, as a few thousand rose to their feet, the buzz for football in the spring felt palpable.

Ebersol beamed. This was his vision, the league he’d sketched out over pancakes with Pro Football Hall of Fame executive Bill Polian. As the stands emptied for the last time, he lingered on the field, shaking hands with players who hoped the AAF might be their second chance.

“Charlie Ebersol, that’s my guy,” Trent Richardson, the Iron’s running back, said in the locker room after. “He gets it.”

But the league wouldn’t finish its first season, cancelling its final two weeks, as well as the playoffs. Players returned from canceled practices Tuesday to find they’d been kicked out of their hotel rooms. In Memphis, some woke up to thousands of dollars in unpaid hotel charges on their accounts.

By 2 p.m. Tuesday, long after word of the AAF’s demise had spread, league employees received a short email sent from a generic company address. The email alerted them that their employment would be terminated the next day. “Thank you again for your service,” it read.

Polian issued a statement, expressing his disappointment. By Thursday, Ebersol had yet to break his silence. The AAF did not make him available for this story.

“They certainly didn’t take care of the employees,” Garner said. “They terminated everyone, no severance, no anything, you’re done. The players are stranded and told they have to find their own way home. Even if you had to end it, you could’ve done it in a classy way. This was classless.”

***

As the National Football League became a ratings behemoth, tightening its stranglehold as the most popular form of televised entertainment America had ever seen, there have been many well-funded, ill-fated attempts to parlay that success into a spinoff.

First among these flops was the World Football League, which couldn’t deliver on its initial promise – or on player paychecks – and folded in 1975 after two abbreviated seasons. A decade later, on advice from New Jersey team owner (and future president) Donald Trump, the United States Football League made a disastrous decision to move from spring to fall, quickly squandering its early success. The XFL later met a similar fate, debuting to huge ratings before closing down after one season, doomed by misguided gimmicks and bad football. None, however, fell apart as swiftly as the AAF.

And yet, amid this graveyard of failed upstarts, the allure of launching a spring football league persists now more than ever. It is an El Dorado of sorts for gridiron-minded entrepreneurs, intoxicating investors into spending millions on the assumption that Americans don’t just want more football, they need it. In spite of the AAF’s failure, multiple other leagues plan to launch over the next year, all with their own ideas on how to fill that football void.

“When you consider that football is so dominant,” Ebersol said in March, “the fact that there is no alternative football league out there is a bizarre reality.”

Ebersol is more familiar than most with the past failures of alternative leagues. His father, Dick, helped launch the XFL in 2001 as chairman of NBC Sports. Ebersol himself co-directed a documentary, “This Was The XFL,” which chronicled the league’s downfall. It was from that experience that Ebersol became convinced of why other spring leagues had failed in the past.

“People have dramatically underestimated how important it is to have good football,” he explained. “They haven’t had the operation to be able to do it.”

So he joined with Polian, the longtime NFL general manager and Indianapolis Colts president, and set out to construct an entire league infrastructure in mere months. It was an ambitious undertaking, but with the specter of other leagues looming, the urgency felt necessary in order to fulfill the promise of the highest quality football.

“We all realized it was rushed,” Garner, the Fleet president, said. “We knew that we were moving forward at the pace we were to capture talent ahead of the XFL. … I think it was probably the right thing to do from a football perspective. But everything else suffered from that.”

With the inaugural season fast approaching, the Fleet struggled to find facilities for practices or team meetings. The team was left scrambling after short notice kept them from securing the Chargers’ former practice facility at Murphy Canyon.

So the Fleet ultimately held their practices behind a maintenance shed, at the far corner of the SDCCU Stadium parking lot, where the team shared two shortened grass fields with a rugby club and a youth soccer academy. The field conditions were good, but the arrangement was hardly ideal. Players had to be bused from the field to the stadium’s locker room every day, while a series of trailers were converted into team meeting rooms.

“We made a little trailer park,” Garner said. “We did the best we could.”

Still, Fleet players weren’t complaining. They saw only opportunity. “I’ve been a couple places where your reps are so limited that it’s impossible to make an impression,” said Fleet and former Rams wideout Nelson Spruce.

With a three-year, guaranteed contract in hand, Spruce even wondered if he might choose to stay with the AAF over an NFL practice squad.

“I’m pretty invested in this,” he said.

***

Before he became chairman of the AAF, in a decision that would ultimately spark the league’s downfall, Tom Dundon accumulated his massive fortune primarily off subprime auto loans, which offer risky, high-interest loans to desperate people who are likely to default on their payments.

Dundon’s short-lived investment in the AAF was not all that dissimilar. After one of the league’s primary backers, Reggie Fowler, pulled the remainder of his pledged investment just a week into the season, the AAF found itself dangerously short on cash, even as TV ratings exceeded expectations. A delay on player paychecks was blamed publicly on a “payroll glitch”.

Then, in swooped Dundon, who committed $250 million and took unilateral control of the league.

“We didn’t assume in our business model that we would have this much success, this fast,” Ebersol raved in March. “We didn’t expect someone like Tom would want to pay such a significant amount of money to be a part of it this early.”

Dundon described the investment as “enough money to run this league for a long time.” Polian said it provided the AAF with “long-term stability, three, four years down the road.” But Dundon’s takeover was met with a mix of relief and unease among team officials, many of whom questioned how Ebersol and Polian could so quickly hand over control of their league to a deep-pocketed investor with unclear motivations.

The red flags only accumulated from there. On Dundon’s orders, team budgets were immediately slashed to account for only bare essentials. Marketing and promotions budgets were eliminated, as were team dinners. The night before one game, Fleet officials found out that the league hadn’t paid vendors for a fireworks show they’d advertised extensively to local fans. They convinced the league to cover the cost just in time.

Still, the vision of the league’s co-founders appeared to be at least somewhat intact before the final week of March. That’s when Dundon told USA Today that the league would likely fold without a formal player-sharing agreement with the NFL Players Association.

The ultimatum was a stunning departure from comments Ebersol and Polian made weeks earlier. While a developmental partnership with the NFL had always been a part of the league’s business plan, Ebersol shrugged off the suggestion that an immediate agreement was necessary to the AAF’s survival.

“Ultimately,” Ebersol said, “with or without a relationship with the NFL, we’re a developmental league for the NFL.”

The sudden shift in plan left officials in both leagues confounded. Dundon had no leverage to force the NFL into a partnership that almost certainly would violate its collective bargaining agreement. Sources within the AAF confirmed that Polian and Ebersol strongly disagreed with Dundon’s tactics. As chairman, however, Dundon had the power to shut down the AAF on his own – though doing so meant sacrificing $70 million he already invested.

Speculation over his motivation ensues, days after the league shut down. Some league officials have posited that Dundon, who also owns the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes, might have bought the AAF for its gambling and real-time tracking technology. Given the tangle of investors involved, the actual answer is likely a simpler one.

“It made no sense to any of us,” Garner said. “There were ongoing conversations, as recently as Monday with the NFLPA. They were definitely talking. It was moving in a good direction with them, and ultimately, something would’ve been worked out. This had very little to do with the NFLPA.

“It was about money, plain and simple.”

***

Even as its vision was compromised and its capital ran dry, Garner held out hope the AAF would make it through the end of its first season. The product, he felt, had been as Ebersol promised. The TV ratings remained steady. With some time – and money – maybe the league could regroup.

By Wednesday, as he cleaned out his office in San Diego, Garner had given up on that future. Like most others around the league, he blames Dundon for the league’s demise.
But Ebersol and Polian are certainly not blameless. Both trumpeted the AAF’s stability, repeatedly assuring that the league had years of financial runway remaining. In spite of those assurances, it took just one week for the AAF to face possible financial collapse. The league lasted just seven more weeks after that, and with unpaid bills and unhappy investors, it could face impending litigation for months to come.

“The stability of the funding was misrepresented to everybody,” Garner said. “But we did have the right idea, and they were trying to do the right thing.”

As Fleet employees filed in on their last day, though, Ebersol’s original vision no longer mattered. Garner had moved his family from Pennsylvania to San Diego to be the Fleet’s president.

Now, in his last few hours, all that was left of the Fleet for him to preside over was laptop inventory.

“Hopefully,” Garner said, “the league will sell these to pay their creditors.”

 by dieterbrock
6 years 3 months ago
 Total posts:   11512  
 Joined:  Mar 31 2015
United States of America   New Jersey
Hall of Fame

https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/04/04/aaf-p ... gs-tracker

AAF players who have signed with NFL teams:

• Damontre Moore, San Diego Fleet (DL): Signed with San Francisco (Adam Schefter, ESPN)

• Keith Reaser, Orlando Apollos (CB): Signed with Kansas City Chiefs (Adam Schefter, ESPN)

• Rashad Ross, Arizona Hotshots (WR): Signed with Carolina Panthers (Adam Schefter, ESPN)

• Garrett Gilbert, Orlando Apollos (QB): Signed with Cleveland Browns (Team announcement)

• Derron Smith, San Antonio Commanders (Safety): Signed with Minnesota Vikings (Team announcement)

• Duke Thomas, San Antonio Commanders (CB): Signed with Minnesota Vikings (Team announcement)

 by Elvis
6 years 2 months ago
 Total posts:   41510  
 Joined:  Mar 28 2015
United States of America   Los Angeles
Administrator

The key of course will be how many make NFL teams, i mean a lot of these guys have been in camp before. But yeah, making the AAF look like a good idea, if only they coulda made it work...


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223 posts Jul 09 2025