Tag Archives: sports

Fishbreath Watches: Alliance of American Football Review

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If you’re a regular here at all, you’ll recall that I’ve been watching and enjoying the AAF, the current player in the spring football scrub league space.

The thing is, spring football scrub leagues have rather a fraught history. There was the XFL1. The less said about that, the better. The USFL puttered along for three seasons in the 1980s, then tried to go toe to toe with the NFL and immediately folded. There are a bunch of minor leagues listed on Wikipedia, none of which I’ve ever heard of.

There were are2 arena football leagues. The Arena Football League is down to six teams, but still trying its very best, while the American Arena League (est. 2017) is actually expanding to Pittsburgh3. There are other leagues, too, according to Wikipedia, which comes as something of a surprise. Arena football has some novelty, at least, with its smaller teams, smaller field, high scoring, and backyard-style rules (you can motion toward the line of scrimmage, and the nets are in play!).

Arena football lives, yes, but nobody has ever built a successful, enduring spring football league playing with substantially NFL-like rules. There’s one obvious reason: you’re competing with other, more meaningful sports. Hockey season is starting to get interesting, baseball fans wait on the edge of their seats for spring training news, basketball both pro and college is in full swing. Fans don’t have unlimited attention. You need buy-in, and you need a good product.

Does the AAF have it?

Buy-In

So far, there’s a surprising amount of buzz around the AAF. The games aren’t heavily attended by NFL standards, but they do seem to be drawing reasonable crowds—north of 10,000 in just about every game so far, and more than 20,000 in some instances like San Diego where the local football fans have been robbed or starved of their live football fix.

I’m talking about it, for another, as are the local sports radio personalities and a few of my football-related follows on Twitter and Youtube.

The Rules Changes

Now we get into the question of product quality. At least on this front, parvusimperator and I agree: the AAF’s changes are brilliant.

First: no TV timeouts. They do some product placement and fit in ads during natural stoppages in play, but they never outright stop the game for the purpose of advertising.

Second: fewer natural stoppages in play. Primarily, they’ve eliminated kickoffs. You start at your own 25, or you can elect to try a 4th-and-12 play from your 28.

Third: no extra points. You always go for two points, the effect of which is likely to reduce the number of ties in regulation and therefore of overtime. One of the AAF’s goals is to have games over and done in 2.5 hours. So far, they’re hitting that mark.

Fourth: simpler overtime. Each team gets one possession each, first and goal from the 10. No field goals. After each team gets a crack at it, the score stands.

Finally: the Sky Judge, a referee who watches from the press box and corrects bad calls.

The On-Field Product

The rules don’t matter if the football is crap.

So far, it hasn’t exactly been uniformly good, but it hasn’t been crap either. For every San Diego Fleet quarterback situation (two different starters through two games, combining for a less-than-50% completion rate) there’s an Orlando or Arizona, whose offenses seem to be firing on all cylinders and generating high scores and good football action.

It’s a little early to say if it’ll stay middling or trend one way or the other, but it’s a decent start for what it is, ultimately: an NFL minor league.

The Viewing Experience

One thing the AAF is doing right is streaming their games. During Week 1, you got the CBS commentary teams. Not so during week 2—instead, the stream was a commentary-free, graphics-free skycam, typically showing plays from the Madden-esque behind-the-QB perspective. Situation and score information comes from the web page surrounding the stream. You can decide for yourself if that’s good or bad.

Obviously, I haven’t been to a game in person, given that I am in Pittsburgh, where it is cold, and the AAF is largely located in the south, where it is warm. (Or warmer, at least.) Ticket prices are pretty reasonable. If you want a season pass to the club level, with (at least in some stadiums) all-inclusive food and drink, that’ll run you $800 or so a seat. If you don’t mind sitting at the top of the stadium (or the top of the lower bowl, for larger stadiums), you can find season tickets as cheap as $75, which (like some Browns games a year or two ago) is less than you might pay, per game, to get into a high-end high school game.

Concession prices seem to vary. They’re expensive in San Diego, because they’re playing in the Chargers’ old digs and don’t have full control over prices. I can’t find anyone talking about prices one way or another for the other teams.

The Intangibles

The team names feel a little strange right now, but I suspect that’s familiarity as much as anything. ‘Orlando Apollos’ may not be very poetic, but then, I come from a town with Steelers and Penguins, neither of which is much of an exemplar of the beauty of English.

Already, the league’s financials seem shaky—they needed an emergency infusion of cash to the tune of $250 million, which is half again as much as they’ve raised to date. $750 million in total is a big initial investment to recoup. For comparison, in 2015, the Packers’ total revenue was $376 million, between their share of the league pool and their own tickets, merchandising, and concessions income, of which $40 million was profit. If the AAF as a whole is as big as the Packers, which I doubt, that’s a lot of years before they make their money back.

Which is why it seems the AAF is going all in on gambling. They’re already part owned by some casino or another, and there’s been talk of next-play betting and daily fantasy built in to the AAF’s mobile apps. I understand that move, but I’m not entirely comfortable with it for reasons I can’t quite articulate.

Maybe it’s because the league, teams, and future gambling operations are all one organization. Look at last Sunday’s San Diego Fleet game. They were up 21-12 with 30 seconds to go in the game, and were 9.5-point favorites. They kicked a field goal. If I were a gambling man and I had money on an NFL game with that outcome, I would grouse, but not seriously. It’s a little more suspicious when my bookie also employs the players and coaches.

That’s awfully conspiracy-minded of me, isn’t it? Let me be clear: I don’t honestly believe that the AAF will get into the game-fixing business when they can already print money with above-board gambling. In the final reckoning, I like the AAF so far. Will it have staying power? Only time will tell. The football is half decent, though, and for the fan who’s already itching for the NFL preseason, it’s good Sunday afternoon comfort food.

  1. Apparently, they’re trying again, launching in 2020. I’ll believe it when I see it. ↩
  2. News to me! ↩
  3. They play at the massive 1200-seat RMU Island Sports Complex Dome. ↩

On quarterbacks, championships, and reptuations

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Tom Brady is not the greatest quarterback of all time.

That got your attention, I suspect1. You can’t swing a cat without hitting someone making the claim that Mr. Brady of the Patriots is the greatest of all time, especially at times (like now) when he’s added to his collection of championship jewelry. It’s a popular view, shared by many a sportswriter, but I don’t think it stands up to scrutiny.

We won’t stoop so far as to bandy about the word ‘cheater’. My argument is rooted in statistics. What is Brady best at? As it turns out, none of the headline quarterback numbers. He’s fourth all-time in passing yards and completions, and third all-time in quarterback rating and touchdown passes. Drew Brees is better in all three categories2, and has consistently had a less effective supporting cast. Peyton Manning still has more yards and touchdowns than Brady, and took one season fewer to rack up the numbers. (Manning played 18 seasons. Brady is up to 19.) Aaron Rodgers leads all of them in career quarterback rating by a country mile, and frequently has no surrounding offense of any note. So, why does the sports world think Brady is the best?

Wins. That is, both regular-season wins and playoff wins, where his record is admittedly superb. He’s 237-70 in games he started for a .772 winning percentage, both of which are marks that may stand forever3. Only our own Ben Roethlisberger and Seattle’s Russell Wilson are even close, and by ‘close’ I don’t even mean within .100 (.670 and .668, respectively). In the playoffs, his record is just as good, 30-104, and all six of the Patriots Super Bowl wins.

It’s a pretty wild resume, that’s for sure, but we’ve established that Brady, statistically, is NFL royalty but not the undisputed king. Given that science indicates there is no such quality as clutch, we can’t give Brady the nod for that in our scientific study. To set him apart from the crowd, all we’re left with is his record.

The regular season is easy to explain: the Patriots are a big fish in a small pond. They are joined in the AFC East by three perennial dumpster fires, who they repeatedly thrash year after year en route to an easy playoff berth, coasting on an all-but-guaranteed four to six wins per season. The playoffs require a deeper look.

Or, perhaps, a thought experiment. Why is Drew Brees not making deep playoff runs or winning championships year after year? Remember, clutch isn’t a thing. Given that New England and New Orleans both have top-tier quarterbacks under center, what’s the difference?

Coaching. That, I think, is the real answer here. Without taking anything away from Brady, who is deservedly bound for the Hall of Fame, Bill Belichick is the reason why the Patriots are always contenders.

For one, there’s scheming5. If you follow sports, you’re no doubt familiar with two genres of article: first, those predicting that a game the Patriots are playing in will go in such-and-such a way; second, those following said game which express surprise that it went in an entirely different direction. That’s the true Patriots way: in must-win games, they always play a game which perfectly exploits their opponents’ weaknesses. Look at the Super Bowl: the high-flying (if you’ll permit me the cliche) Rams scored three points, and those only on a long field goal. By playing an unusual defense they have little history with, the Patriots made it hard to plan for their defensive strategy. By using a very north-south style of defensive line play, they took the teeth out of the Rams’ running game, and put so much pressure on Goff that he could never find a rhythm.

For another, there’s personnel. Brady has never had a huge supporting cast, but he’s almost always had at least two good receivers to throw to: usually, a deep threat and an underneath possession guy. This year, it was Edelman and Gronkowski. In 2007, it was Welker and Moss. Belichick has a preternatural talent for finding the right pieces to the puzzle, and they’re rarely big-name stars.

Finally, there’s motivation. Belichick keeps his teams hungry by convincing them nobody is giving them credit, or that everybody has lost faith in their ability to win. This is facially absurd, but it works. All it takes is one iffy loss for the nation’s sportswriters to plaster their front pages with stories about how the Patriots dynasty is over, Brady is decrepit, and Belichick’s devil’s bargain has finally run out. Wallpaper your locker room with those and give the right speech, and bam. A motivated, hungry team.

It’s worth saying that Brady would probably still be a top-tier quarterback talent without Belichick. I don’t think he would have as many rings as he does, though, and I do think that Belichick would be widely regarded as a successful coach even without a superstar quarterback.

I’ll put it to you in the form of a hypothetical. You can have one of these two scenarios: your team retains its head coach but gets Brady as its quarterback; your team retains its quarterback but gets Belichick as its head coach.

I think it’s an obvious choice.

  1. Unless you aren’t a football fan, but then why are you reading this article? ↩
  2. At least as of October 18, when the SB Nation article I’m cribbing from was written. I’m not invested enough in this argument to bother with very much research. ↩
  3. He’s .825 at home, which is absurd. ↩
  4. Playing in 40 playoff games itself is absurd. Roethlisberger is next on the list at a mere 21. ↩
  5. In the sense of game planning, not in the sense of nefarious moustache-twirling. ↩