The fledgling Alliance of American Football is banking on post-Super Bowl down time and the spread of legal sports betting to whet enough fan interest to provide it with a foothold to compete with the NFL.
If it’s any indication, business was off to a strong start this month𑁋the league’s February 9 debut on CBS drew more than 2.9 million viewers, according to Nielsen, topping the NBA on ABC.
But backers know the field is littered with the broken bodies of upstarts who tried in the past to challenge the dominance of the National Football League. They know that only time will tell. But the league’s connections to the NFL will help.
Certainly, the AAF has plenty of savvy at the top. TV producer Charlie Ebersol is one of the founders. His father, Dick Ebersol, was a legendary executive with NBC—and a partner in the ill-fated XFL, which folded in 2001 after only one season. The other is Bill Polian, a pro football Hall of Famer and a former general manager of the Buffalo Bills. Together they’ve recruited a roster of big-name coaching veterans like Steve Spurrier, Mike Singletary, Dennis Erickson and Mike Martz to run the eight teams they’ve launched with, all of which the league owns, and they’ve secured distribution deals with NFL Network, TNT and Turner Broadcasting’s B/R Live streaming service, in addition to CBS Sports.
Timing the 10-week season to commence the weekend after the Super Bowl was by design as well, as was the decision to end it before the NFL draft.
As Ebersol put it, “It would be an act of insanity to try to compete with the NFL.”
Some gimmicks have been thrown for good measure. There are no kickoffs (teams will start on their 25-yard line instead) and no point-after kicks (only two-point conversions), and a so-called “sky judge” watches over the action with the power to correct officiating errors immediately.
Other innovations are raising some eyebrows: like no TV timeouts, completing games in two and a half hours, tickets priced no higher than $50, and three-year $250,000 contracts to hundreds of players, 70 percent of whom have played in the NFL.
“There’s always been a belief that there’s room for spring football because of the game’s popularity,” John Kosner, a media consultant and former ESPN executive told Bloomberg. But, he noted, “No one has pulled this off before, so it’s not trivial what they are trying to do.”
It won’t help that the ill-fated XFL is planning a comeback next year with Vince McMahan of World Wrestling Entertainment fame bankrolling the enterprise and big plans for 2020, including “reviewing every facet of the game, on-field and off, to see where changes can be made to make the game faster and more exciting”.
But Ebersol believes he’s got a winning formula, and with legal sports betting sweeping the country, he believes the timing is on his side.
“Two hundred million watch college and pro football compared to the 130 million combined that watch the other major sports,” he told Bloomberg. “We don’t need to get all of those football fans to tune back in, but I like our chances of getting a significant chunk of them.”
Kosner agrees, insofar as the movement of sports betting into the mainstream of American culture is generating levels of energy and investment in the business of sports he says are “unparalleled in my career”.
AAF backers include venture capital firms like Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, media companies like the Chernin Group and casino giant MGM Resorts International, whose money the league is plowing into platforms like an app that can provide reams of data in milliseconds to engage fans with in-play betting and other interactive experiences.
“It’s a technology play,” said Scott Butera, MGM’s president for interactive gaming. “These specialty leagues will be relevant to sports betting. We think what they are doing is portable to other sports in terms of streaming, watching and making it an entertaining customer experience.”
So far, bettor interest has been anything but off the charts, and bookmakers are finding themselves challenged to set viable lines in the absence of any competitive history.
As Jay Kornegay, vice president of operations at the Westgate Las Vegas Superbook, told the Associated Press, Week 1 action “was light in football terms, but understandably so. Pretty robust at some books, comparable to an NBA game, while at others it trickled in.”
“It was more than I expected,” said Joe Asher, CEO of William Hill US, which operates books in Nevada, New Jersey and several other states. “Tiny in comparison to the NFL, but not bad considering it’s a brand-new league.”
Mattias Stetz, chief operating officer of Rush Street Interactive, which operates sportsbooks at two Pennsylvania casinos and in New Jersey, likewise described his handle as “relatively small to start.”
“But we expect it to pick up as players get more familiar with the league,” he said. “TV ratings were surprisingly high, and betting handle tends to follow public interest, so we are excited to see where things go from here.”
Ebersol, in the meantime, is counseling confidence and patience.
“We are not trying to be sexy. We just need to block and tackle on the field as well as off it,” he said. “This is going to take five to seven years, and there’s going to be empty seats at first. I caution everyone that this is not going to be an overnight success. But we will succeed.”
