Watching AAF on TV, streaming worth the time
Curious as any football fan would be, I checked into the Alliance of American Football on Saturday and Sunday nights, choosing a few different viewing options — broadcast television, streaming online and by way of an iPhone app — and as a TV experience it was just fine.
Someone should convince the league of that.
The football was entertaining and the technological innovations, particularly watching and listening to a replay official think out loud while deciding whether to overturn a call, were interesting.
But has any outfit ever worked so hard to convince you that it belonged? Rather than trusting the fans to decide what’s what, the first weekend was devoted to letting you, the viewer, know that the AAF, as it’s called, knows that it is not a replacement for the NFL.
Instead, it’s a fix for football addicts — but more important, as we were reminded time and again, it’s a second (or third, or fourth or fifth) chance for some really good players to finally make it to the pros.
Here’s a statistic to remember, mostly because if you watched for more than 10 minutes, you’d never forget it, as you heard it repeated several times: 81 percent of the league’s players have, at one time or another, signed an NFL contract. Obviously for 100 percent of them, it didn’t work out. But they’re all looking for another chance.
“We can be the training ground for the NFL,” Bill Polian, one of the founders of the AAF, said during a pregame interview before the first games were played Saturday. This, after the introduction talked repeatedly about appealing to the football fan trying to fill the void left since … a week ago Sunday.
The league — sorry, the Alliance, as everyone associated with it never failed to call it — brought out Kurt Warner, who is in both the Pro Football and Arena League halls of fame, to extol its virtues, which was a good choice. Who better to talk about making the most of an unexpected opportunity?
The theme carried through the first game — Phoenix viewers saw the San Antonio Commanders beat the San Diego Fleet 15-6 — and continued through the Arizona Hotshots’ 38-22 win over the Salt Lake City Stallions on Sunday. We get it. You belong.
After all, you’re preaching to the choir — if we’re watching (and Saturday night’s debut got decent ratings), we’re interested already.
There are intriguing innovations. There are no kickoffs, which is clearly a dry run for the NFL, which wants to dump them for safety reasons. But when they trotted Hines Ward, the Alliance’s head of player relations, to ceremoniously place the ball on the 25- yard line to begin the inaugural game in San Antonio, well, it wasn’t exactly thrilling.
You know what was? Former Arizona State University and current San Diego quarterback Mike Bercovici nearly getting his helmet torn off, and his head nearly going with it, during Saturday’s game, an instantly viral moment that had people talking about the game and the Alliance, at least for a while.
And the replay official, who seemed as if he were pulled away from dinner to amiably discuss whether a receiver had both feet in bounds during a catch? That was TV gold, seriously.
I tried watching the Arizona game Sunday on the AAF app, by which you are supposed to be able to guess upcoming plays, among other things, but it didn’t work out so well. Mostly it was a bunch of animated players moving around not unlike they did in the old electric-football games you’d set up in your living room, plugging it in and watching them roam around randomly.
However, the AAF website also streamed the game Sunday, without announcers, so that you got native sound, pretty much what you would have heard if you were at Sun Devil Stadium. Which meant when players uttered obscenities, you heard that, too.
Yay, realism.
All in all, the AAF is kind of like a well-financed and publicized version of the NBA’s D-League, a developmental stop for players who either missed their shot the first time around or are hoping for their first time around. It’s something to do if you’re channel surfing, and the quality of the game is better than you’re probably thinking. As some of you are clearly thinking.
“I have no idea what ‘AAF game’ could possibly be — but hey, football is supposed to be over,” one person tweeted. “It’s spring training time…”
That’s something the AAF desperately doesn’t want to hear, as its broadcasts and streams proved over the weekend. If it just relaxes and trusts its product, it might not hear much more of it.