AAF gets lifeline from Dundon
When the Alliance of American Football debuted a little over a week ago to decent television ratings, it was widely viewed as a strong start for an upstart league with modest goals.
The strong start lasted a matter of days.
On Tuesday morning, the AAF announced that Tom Dundon, the entrepreneur who also happens to own the Carolina Hurricanes, had “committed” US$250-million to the football league, which is certainly a commitment. Multiple reports suggested the AAF had been close to insolvent, and the Dundon intervention was variously reported as his having either saved the league or essentially bought it. By the end of the day, it was evident that Dundon had bought the AAF, although whether he did so to keep the lights on remains unclear.
It’s not unexpected that the AAF would have had some issues in its first season, as has always been the case for spring football in the United States, but usually the first brush with death doesn’t come quite so soon.
Perhaps it should have been more obvious, though, that something like this was coming. The AAF includes eight teams, all league-owned, six of which have played home games so far through two weeks. Attendance has been strongest in San Antonio, former home of the CFL’s Texans, where a reported 28,000 or so made the Alamodome a little under half full. No other team cracked 21,000, and some of the announced attendance figures in other markets didn’t reflect what was actually in the stands. A reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution estimated a crowd of about 9,000 in the stands for Atlanta’s game at San Diego, which means there were more than 60,000 empty seats at the former home of the Chargers. (Announced attendance was a little over 20,000.) Similarly, Memphis reporters put the actual attendance at that team’s home opener at about half the announced total of 11,000 at Liberty Bowl Stadium, which has a capacity of 61,000.
The television ratings, which had underscored so much of the Americans-will-watch-any-football coverage of the opening weekend, were due for a steep decline in Week 2. The league’s opening game was televised on CBS, but the AAF won’t be shown again on that broadcast network until the championship game in late April. Instead, the AAF will be found on little-watched cable outlets like CBS Sports Network and the NFL Network, where audiences will be a tiny fraction of what it was on the main CBS network. (Week 2 ratings were expected to be disclosed on Wednesday.)
Dundon’s largesse could be just the thing that’s needed to backstop the AAF into something more than the one-and-done of so many spring leagues, but whatever happens, there are lessons here for the Canadian Football League, which has watched the emergence of the AAF — and the planned relaunch next year of the XFL — with some trepidation.
Commissioner Randy Ambrosie has spent a lot of time this off-season pushing his expansion of the CFL into foreign markets, with forays into Mexico and across Europe, all of which are intended to result in media deals in those countries and, in theory, CFL fans across the globe. It’s a nice idea. But actually creating those fans in new markets is another thing. You can’t just show up and drop your football at midfield and expect enthusiastic support.