Spring/Summer Football

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I am going to attempt to write about things that I am a fan of subjects that I am knowledgeable about like sports and pop culture; to inagurate this new era for the blog(okay, I might be a bit silly with that comment, but oh well) I am going to write about a subject I know a lot about: sports.

To me sports(like writing about and watching Scooby Doo) is a great escape from the news every so often, no matter if it is current or classic, and speaking of classic that's kind of where i'll start off this blog.

Back in the mid 70's there was a professional football league called the World Football League, now it was a decent league but it had a few problems: one, they didn't get a national TV network contract so the games ended up on TVS, a "network" of stations owned by former Chicago White Sox owner and television executive Eddie Einhorn; the reason I say network in quotation marks is because it was actually a syndicator that distributed sporting events to stations around the country, similar to what distributors like ESPN Plus and Lincoln Financial Sports(formerly Raycom Sports) do today; TVS also worked with the NBC Television Network to produce college basketball games for said network for many years as well and some of their games are available for viewing online; now while TVS got decent clearance for the games, it wasn't ABC, CBS, or NBC, which is why they failed.

Two, inflated attendence figures: for a few weeks in the 1974 WFL season the league's teams claimed outlandish attendance numbers, like 60 or 70,000 for games in Philly or New York for example, when in reality only about 3 or 4,000 people attended a regular season game, which didn't help them a lot either.

Three, salaries and players: the WFL signed stars from the NFL such as Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick of the Miami Dolphins, which is probably the worst thing a league who's trying to compete against the NFL could do.

And Four, unstable franchises and teams: in the WFL teams would move in mid season or in places where there was an NFL caliber stadium, such as Detroit or New York, the WFL would have to play in high school or local college which meant that on occasion play and attendence suffered for the league's franchises; all those reasons are why the WFL lasted only a season and a half before folding.

In 1983, another league tried to get a piece of the pro football pie and it was known as the USFL, or United States Football League; this league succeeded for a while before falling in the same trap as the WFL, it tried to compete with the NFL by signing star college players and players that the NFL wouldn't touch, such as the late Reggie White, Herschel Walker, Doug Flutie and others, the final nails in the USFL's coffin however were two fold: when Donald Trump bought the New Jersey Generals, and then the league's owners decided to play in the fall, against the NFL; needless to say that was the end of that and after a trial, folded.

Two other attempts for spring and summer football were made as well; one was the World League of American Football, which later became NFL Europe and was sanctioned by the NFL; the other, well the other was the Canadian Football League's attempt to add US teams, which failed after three years; I say the CFL is spring/summer football because the league starts in the summer.

While the Arena Football League folded and then came back, and the United Football League began last year, I don't really consider those spring/summer football leagues because one is indoors and plays with different rules and the other plays in the fall, much like the WFL did for a year and a half(at least for part of the season), and the USFL tried to do; therefore I feel that it is time to found a new football league that would play in the spring and summer.

I actually came up with an idea for a new league a while back, it's called the North American Football League and would play in a few places that the Arena Football League and Arena Football 2 played in a few years back; some of the places the AFL and AF2 played in were major cities and have outdoor stadiums that could concievably be used for football; however there are a few problems with my idea.

One: trying to convince people that football could be played in the spring and summer; sure there's Major League Baseball, the WNBA, MLS and NBA and NHL playoffs as well as tennis and golf events throughout both seasons, however in my opinion there's never a thing as too much football.

Two: players and salaries; each league that I mentioned had problems with signing players that were NFL caliber and that the NFL wanted, however the USFL for example signed most of them first; now there are still players that are NFL caliber, but can't get jobs in the league. Even though there are the CFL and Arena Football and now the UFL, that still leaves a ton of players that could still play football and want to play football professionally, which is why a league like this could still work, especially with a possible NFL lockout in a couple years.

Three: television; this might be a bit easier then previous attempts at spring football, considering the changes that have happened in TV sports in the past decade; several broadcast networks and various cable networks would love football of any kind and this is where the NAFL could work.

That's about it for now, I may post again about a possible divisional alignment for the league, but that's for another time I guess; bye for now and i'll be back again with another blog post, same time, same website.