Norman Einstein's
ISSUE 05 (10/09)
"Lessons From a Smaller Field"
by Brian Lauvray
[Brian is a Chicago-based writer. Aside from Norman Einstein's, his resume includes relationship blogger for the Tyra Banks Show and hot dog expert for The Onion's A.V. Club. Brian frequently writes about Chicago for Trazzler and laments the Bulls and Bears at Gapers Block.]
America love BIG.
Our nation's thirst for BIG pervades all aspects of our culture. The prized jewels of the American nouveau riche are tremendously blinged-out SUVs bearing names like "Denali," the biggest mountain in North America, and bloated McMansions located in developments named, "Grouse Pines." Our country's collectively expanding waistline is encouraged to expand further by convenience stores hocking us Big Gulp-sized sodas, fast food chains daring us to add bacon to even their healthiest offerings, and megamarts enticing us to buy potato chips in bulk with impossible-to-pass-up discounts.
The realm of professional sports is hardly immune to the obsession with BIG.
Starting in the 1990s and continuing into this decade, every major sports league, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, all undertook unchecked growth throughout America's Sun Belt. Boomtowns like Nashville, Charlotte, Phoenix, and Tampa all received at least two new professional sports teams through relocation or new franchises.
This wanton craving of all things BIG has come back to bite the U-S-A in the A-S-S. Realtors and mortgage companies alike, spurred on by unchecked bubble prospecting, formed the Prime Meridian for this worldwide economic mess. The Big Three automakers, as if they were huffing gas, ignored decades-long trends suggesting smaller and more fuel efficient vehicles were the way to go.
Meanwhile, cardiologists cringe at your parents' triglyceride levels and Michael Pollan chides readers of the New Yorker about their eating habits.
As for the world of pro sports? There, too, America's yen for BIG has poisoned the well, often leaving sports leagues with financially bleak forecasts. Sure, the juggernaut that is the NFL forges ahead, but NBA owners are up-in-arms over monetary land mines on the horizon and are sure to be screwing commissioner David Stern's thumbs to get a smaller salary cap for the 2010-2011 season. The NHL is still not out of the woods thanks to its misguided era of expansion and the ill-timed strike that killed an entire season. MLB has thus far dodged a good deal of the assault, but teams are starting to feel the burden that fewer tickets, concessions, and merchandise sales lead to.
Beyond the big boys, the smaller leagues have been flat-out abused by not only this recession, everyone's been affected by that, but also by the symptoms of BIG being better.
Nowhere has this been apparent than with the is-it-dead-or-alive Arena Football League. America's lust for football does not take an off-season. We drool over a prospect's combine times and measurables. NFL Draft weekend is a de facto holiday. And the opening of training camps is an agonzing but welcome tease. For the better part of the 25 years, the only relief for rabid fans through the pigskin-less wasteland of March to September was the AFL.
A league that could've been drawn up on a cocktail napkin featured pinball-style scoring and shorter fields to maximize the frenetic pace. Initially a laughingstock with its rebound netting for goal posts, the AFL blossomed in the early 1990s as a post-United States Football League reprieve from the formality and structure of the NFL. Early suspicions turned to cautious acceptance to modest fervor following former AFL star Kurt Warner's Super Bowl championship with the NFL's St Louis Rams. If the NFL was the sports fan's Hollywood blockbuster, the AFL was a direct-to-DVD release: a guilty pleasure to tide you over on a lazy summer afternoon until the NFL returned in fall.
Credit: go.soul.1-2-3-boom! (Flickr)
Along the way, however, the AFL decided it should get BIG. The AFL took the consumer-based entertainment model, a la the NFL, and accidentally wrote the textbook on how not to run a league of mid-market franchises. Over-expansion tackled the AFL from the very day that the powers-that-be decided upon it. In total, 12 franchises were awarded during the 2000s. Bloated, the league plodded towards its demise over the course of the decade.
Of course, to simply state "over-expansion killed the AFL, the end, KTHXBAI!" is grossly oversimplifying the post mortem on what was, at least for a time, a viable pro sports league. The AFL perservered through early growing pains in the 1980s. Make no mistake, the AFL was no flash-in-the-pan XFL or even ABA-styled league. The league grew into a phenom for the football-obsessesed, perpetually on the cusp of establishing themselves. It even spawned a successful spin-off league, the af2, that settled its franchises in football-crazy small markets that the NFL could never really touch.
Arguably, the AFL made it as much as any fringe league can in a country obsessed with monolithic sports leagues basking in the center of the national media's attention.
Maybe that's the lesson of the AFL, that no matter how BIG you want to be you're still constrained by the demands of what the market can sustain. A league would be wise to know that market... and know thyselves.
Ironically, what helped kill the AFL may just help save it. Late in September, powers-that-be from the AFL and af2 agreed to a merger bringing in some teams from both leagues to form, well, not a confederation or two-tier system. Rather, according to former af2 commissioner Jerry Kurz, they will form "a brand new league."
Details are still vague. Sixteen teams have been identified thus far, culled from the defunct AFL and still operational af2, for the initial league season. And no matter what form the new league, called ArenaFootball1 or AF1, takes, the difficulty of rebuilding its shattered fanbase presents no mean feat.
A glimmer of hope, however, remains for football-starved freaks. And perhaps the AFL's most recent failure provides a cautionary tale from which AF1 and other upstart sports leagues can learn. Kurz certainly displayed some of that cautious wisdom in the AF1 press conference, ensuring AF1 wouldn't expand for expansion's sake. After being brought to the brink by the allure of BIG, maybe this new incarnation of arena football can succeed by being leaner and meaner.
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