There will be a minor league a la baseball. College athletes will play soccer in the fall, lacrosse in the spring. ND will continue to be a fencing power.
Oh yeah, that was me on this board.
and the XFL is going to allow HS players and college players who are not yet eligible for the NFL draft. Seems like a good thing in terms of giving kids options to get paid, and maybe a really good option for a kid who hates school/academically challenged. Just work out and play ball, collect a paycheck.
I think we have enough data points to say confidently that there's not enough public interest in watching an entire league of low-talent football.
Making them check out of housing in a matter of hours was extra shitty.
documentary and a class action lawsuit (contract language be damned). Injured players have no health insurance, vendors owed millions of dollars, players notified by email if at all.
Two high-profile ND guys as co-founders.
My understanding is that problems existed from Day 1 of the Fyre Festival, suggesting that there were fraudulent representations regarding the accommodations. Is that not right?
What I've seen from the AAF sounds like a failed bet and those are the risks of doing business with a start-up. Lineup with the rest of the creditors.
and no predictable channel. I actually watched 3-4 games because most teams had at least one ND player. The problem is half of what I saw were repeats and the other half I could only get when at my Atlanta house where I got the oddball sports channels they ran on.
They needed to be like the NFL where you knew that games started at a set time every Sunday on channels 90% of the US get.
Do they like losing money? I don't get it.
From the NFL Network. I think it is one of the few channels whose viewership continues to rise.
Parsing over potential draft picks probably gets better ratings than the AAF. Hell, the Combine was on ABC for a couple hours this year.
One of the more attractive things about the league was the technology it developed with its app. It allowed for faster real-time technology to reach consumers and also tracked multiple biometric data points. The hope was that other leagues would see the technology and express interest in using it.
"I think what we're building on the tech side will change sports," Ebersol said in January. "If this company has a chance to survive, if the football is good enough that this has a runway where people are engaged, it will change sports."
At the time, Ebersol said he viewed his business as "a tech company that owns a football league."
was not the league’s website, but some sort of real-time wagering app. The betting app being developed and tested in the league was considered the most interesting aspect of the league to many investors. I don’t know all the details other than what I’ve overheard on a radio show or two while in the car, but it seems that the league thought the NFL (or maybe NFLPA) would become a partner due to interest in developing a real-time betting app.
It sounded like a Silicon Valley pitch.
was awful. They tacked the 'live' video feed on top of the play-by-play, but it was often out of sync....the text would appear before the play happened on video, removing any 'excitement'. I wanted to watch Folston, but gave up because the UI was pathetic.
All tech aside, the quality of football was a significant drop off from the NFL and CFL. The owners deserved this fate. They thought they could make money by piggybacking on the NFL. They didn't deliver on quality - and how could they? The gap between NFL players and the average AAF player is huge. They needed to allow late hits, or facemasks, or hell, let someone carry a cattle prod. Give the audience some entertainment value if they are going to sit through a sub-par football game.
It was much closer to Independent Baseball -> MLB than AAA -> MLB. At least minor league baseball is built around entertainment.