Why the AAF was always doomed to fail

A look at why the Alliance of American Football probably won’t survive and whether the XFL can avoid similar pitfalls.

It does not take a Wharton graduate to surmise that if (and probably when) the Alliance of American Football folds, it will be due to a lack of money. Whether that means the founders didn’t have enough to begin with or failed to develop a sufficient revenue stream won’t really matter. The league received a $250 million investment 10 days after its first game and now, a little over a month later, appears to be teetering on ruin. It’s a mess.

There was, it has become abundantly clear, no long-range financial plan. The idea was to launch a football league (with a few interesting quirks) shortly after the NFL season in possibly under-served cities and see if the momentum carried fans into the new league. It did. For one week.

And now we’re here.

Since there are multiple other alternative football leagues in the works — most notably the XFL’s second act, due to start in February of next year — it makes sense to evaluate where the AAF went wrong.

The NFLPA was never going to help

“Control owner” Tom Dundon, the man who injected that quarter-of-a-billion dollars into the AAF literally one day after the founders claimed the money situation was totally fine for real guys, took to USA TODAY earlier this week to explain that the league would fail if the NFLPA didn’t give it players.

…

….

…..

What?

This concept on the whole makes no sense; it’s as if you opened a restaurant and complained that the established chef next store wouldn’t give you his dishes to sell.

It makes even less sense when you consider that one of the primary narratives surrounding the game of football is that it can cause lasting damage to players (specifically their brains) and should, therefore, be played and practiced in a more careful and contained fashion.

The NFLPA has battled to limit the amount of time its players spend getting hit. That last thing it would agree to is letting any of them hop over to a rival league to play another season.

The NFL was never going to help, either

Dundon, who, again, became the head of the new league after the league had started, says he sees the AAF as a development league for the NFL.

This, again, makes no sense whatsoever.

If the NFL wanted to run a development league, it would do so under its own auspice so that it could control revenue. The only reason it doesn’t have such a league is because college football functions as one, and the players there have almost no rights and are not compensated in a way that is remotely fair, thus priming them to enter an NFL machine that will lavish them with phony contracts that aren’t guaranteed before spitting them out in a few years when they aren’t as effective.

When your development league prepares players both physically and mentally (to be subservient and “appreciate the opportunity” to play the game), it’s the best of both worlds!

Besides, the NFL doesn’t need a development league that plays this time of year. It has already wrested attention from average sports fans for the months of February, March and April thanks to the combine, free agency and draft. The NFL definitely aspires to be a year-round product, but this isn’t the weak part of the calendar.

Most football players are mostly anonymous

The average NFL fan can name maybe 10 to 15 players on his or her favorite team, and that’s out of a 53-man roster. The last 25 players on any given NFL team certainly make decent money by any standard and are no doubt important to winning games but they aren’t well known. We barely watch preseason NFL games, which do feature star players (albeit briefly) but are largely used to sort out which fringe players remain. So if you’re making an entire league out of the tier below them you’re going to lack name recognition.

And the guys in a new league who do resonate with fans will often do so for the wrong reason: Johnny Manziel is the AAF’s latest star (though he didn’t even finish out his first game), but only because he failed out of the NFL and then got kicked out of the CFL. Earlier in the year former Penn State star Christian Hackenberg made plenty of news — but only because he was so bad at football that he began swearing a lot even though he was wearing a mic.

Yes, there’s the chance for redemption stories or even unfathomable ones, like when Kurt Warner went from arena football to one of the best players in the NFL, but you can’t build a league around the idea that such a thing might happen. You need players worth watching right now.

The Big 3 concept worked in basketball because there are enough former (and legit) NBA players still willing to play the game and able to do so in a fashion somewhat reminiscent of their heydays. Team them with exciting fringe talent who could ascend to the NBA and you have yourself a league.

Most recognizable NFL players who leave the league do so because their bodies tell them to leave the game entirely.

The pay is lousy

And even if they were inclined to try to keep playing they wouldn’t do it for $250,000 over three years.

Not that $75,000 per year should be laughed at, of course. But for many, many players it’s not going to be worth it to play such a dangerous game for a middle-class salary and the remote chance of working toward the NFL. They’re better off trying to use (or finish) their degree, or to get into the game as a coach somewhere to carve out a longer, more stable career.

So, can the XFL avoid these issues and thrive?

Probably not, but at least the XFL has Vince McMahon, who is inarguably one of the greatest showmen in the history of the country. The XFL will be showy and bawdy and messy in ways that guarantee its run in the spotlight will last longer than a week.

And while television networks crave live content more than ever before, there’s too many top-level sports — from March Madness to playoff chases in the NBA and NHL, to the aforementioned NFL (manufactured) events to MLS and MLB starting their seasons  — happening this time of year to warrant the sort of payouts that would be needed to make a second football league sustainable.