Tuesday, July 9, 2013

An IFL Full of Cheaters

This morning a former IFL coach that i respect and admire had some public comments about the continued allegations of rampant league wide payroll violations.    I felt compelled to issue this as a response.

I'm game for a good rant this morning.  Swallowed too much ool water... (Notice no p, keep it that way, k?)  
The Storm are not alone... The only ones that suffer in the entire debacle are the fans.  You won't raise the player’s pay scale but yet you continue to force teams to travel to Kennewick, WA for 7 games a year.  You also force fans that choose to travel to road games to drive right past venues for teams that you used to play but have chosen to look after their bottom line and disassociate themselves with teams that are doing what Coach just talked about.   You can spin the PR any way you want, tell us they couldn't compete on the field so they took their ball and went home or, perhaps they got tired of ever escalating travel costs.  Mr. Scott and Mr. Hartman didn’t make their collective fortunes needlessly spending money in their businesses.  
If the money from just one trip out to Tri-Cities, WA were split amongst the players…I’m sure they would appreciate it. 

Another way the IFL as a league has failed the fans is with transparency.  Prior to last year I had NO idea that a third party letting a player use a car was against league rules.  Was I unwittingly violating league policy by letting an unnamed player use my car to run to the grocery store in my car?  Was giving him a ride home from the bar considered “additional compensation?”  I also know the Sioux Falls is not the only place where things like that go on. 
I understand the desire to keep your operations manual close to the vest, but there are a lot of things that are best opened up for public consumption, you know like playoff tiebreaker rules being published in the BEGINNING of the season. 
Some teams have needlessly spent untold thousands of dollars in the sake of being competitive.  Sure, everyone loves a winner, but if you can’t make it with your core group of fans and sponsors, minor league sports is the wrong line of work for you. 
OK, so there’s that rant.. now allow me to spend a small amount of time playing devil’s advocate from a historical perspective. 

NONE of the 4 major American professional sports leagues were built up on the idea of a level playing field from a salary standpoint.  Hell the Packers had to issue stock in the team, making them the first and to date only publically owned major professional sports franchise simply to stay solvent in the 1920’s, and then again in the 1950’s.    This notion of fairness and a level payroll playing field is really in its infancy in the history of American professional sports.  Team come and they go until you find area’s where the niche sport catches on.  The NFL was like this in the 1920’s.  There are close to 50 now defunct NFL teams from that era. 
If we are to accurately compare the birth and expansion of a sport one must look WAY further back into history.  For baseball we’re talking the late 1800’s.  Let us also not forget that American Football was also very much a niche sport, bordering on minor league until the mid 1950’s, some 3 decades after it began to be played professionally. 

The AFL (the outdoor league in the 60’s), and the USFL became popular and drive the NFL to up its game why? Money.  They, if even for a brief time out spent the NFL teams who were purposely keeping salaries down, to open up their pocketbooks.  Even in modern collective bargaining the leagues teams have refused to let the players see the books.  To get a really good look at how badly they’re getting jobbed.

Monday, May 20, 2013

Time to Pack Our Bags



____________________________________________________________________________

Indoor football, like life, is cyclical.  Leagues come and go, teams come and go and players come and go.  The only constant is change.  Rarely is the change for the good, but it’s change nonetheless.  If we narrow our historical focus studying indoor football to the 8 man 50 yard variety played in something resembling an arena, without rebound nets, then the history only goes back to 1998.  In that time three professional leagues stand out for having any sort of longevity.  The National Indoor Football League from 2001 to 2006, United Indoor Football 2005-2008, and the second coming of the Indoor Football League 2009-present.  These leagues, as you can see, last roughly 4 to 5 years before they implode, sometimes spectacularly like the NIFL.  

Anyone like me that can handle 3rd grade math in our heads has figured out that based on history alone, the Indoor Football league is doomed.  Couple that with the fact that the current league spread from Wisconsin to Washington state, and from South Dakota to Texas.  All that real estate and the league has only NINE teams.    The IFL have had recent press releases claiming expansion to twelve teams for the 2014 season, but I for one am not going to hold my breath.  I kind of like oxygen as it turns out.  

Throughout my last decade following indoor football and specifically the Sioux Falls Storm, I’ve met some great people, and some not so great.  Every arena has “those” fans, and “those” fans have ranged from 9 to 90 years old.  But it was one of those great fans (and the coincidence of a Storm road game and Mother’s Day) that landed me in the Hartman Arena just outside Wichita, Kansas the other night to watch former Indoor Football league member Wichita Wild take on foes from 90 miles up the road in the Salina Bombers in a Champions Indoor Football League (CPIFL) matchup.  

Ah, what it must be like to have a team only 90 miles away.  That seems like it would be a lot of fun, and it seems like it would make travel for the team cheap and easy.  It’s also an away game that the fans of a visiting team could make.    I remember the good ole days when the Storm had TWO teams in the same league as them that were less than a three hour drive away.  Those days are long gone, and given the history between ownership groups in Sioux Falls and Sioux City, likely to never happen again.  

 It’s too bad really.  Between the skyrocketing costs of travel in the IFL, and the Storm’s dominance on and off the field, owners that knew they wanted a smaller budget to get ends closer to meeting, and that actually wanted to compete jumped ship to the CPIFL.  So far, by the extraordinarily low bar set by the dozens of now defunct, or soon to be defunct leagues the CPIFL has had a phenomenal year.  The have played all of their scheduled games, and there are few of the normal shenanigans that plague leagues at this level.  

The CPIFL does a few things drastically different than the IFL.  First, player compensation is a bit more transparent than the IFL, where the claims are players only make $200 a game.   But many people doubt that every team pays their players only that.  So much so that I’m often reminded of a story Ronald Reagan is often credited with telling, about a boy with eternal optimism, that his father wanted cured.  He took him to a doctor, and the doctor took his patient into a room filled with a mountain of horse dung. "This is for you." The doctor told him. With that, the boy smiled, so wide he could have eaten a banana sideways. Excited, he raced to the top of the mountain of manure, where, with his bare hands, he began digging into the pungent heap. Baffled, the doctor and the parents looked at one another quizzically, "Son," the father asked." What in heaven's name do you think you're doing?"

"Well", the boy replied, "with all this horse dung, I figure there's got to be a pony in there somewhere!"

The CPIFL requires most of its players for live within 125 miles of their home team.  This is obviously a bit flexible, but the idea is to reduce or eliminate the costs of housing most of your 25 man roster.  The players can get reimbursed for mileage to and from practice and games.   This rule is in place so that teams focus on bringing in local talent rather than forcing them to recruit from all over.  It’s not a perfect science based of the rosters I saw, but for the most part it seems to work.  The base salary for the players game checks is also lower with $125 per game being the figure I’ve seen the most.  And, with all of this frugality, the play on the field was barely distinguishable from what I’m accustomed to in the IFL.  Perhaps we’ve wasted a lot of money trying to win games to save a fan base that really didn’t need saving. 

The league currently consists of ten teams, the Wichita Wild, Omaha Beef, Sioux City Bandits, Salina (KS) Bombers, Kansas City Renegades, Bloomington Edge, Lincoln Haymakers, Oklahoma Defenders, Kansas Koyotes, and the Mid-Missouri Outlaws.  Of these, four have spent time in the same league as the Storm in the past.  From talking with Wild fans at the pre-game tailgate it’s obvious to them that three teams are in danger of not being around next season, Mid-Missouri, Kansas (Topeka) and Kansas City all have little fan support, and are not very good on the field.  
It would be nice if lining up to fill those fictitiously vacated spots would be three current IFL teams that have enjoyed strong fan support  this season with Sioux Falls, Nebraska, and Cedar Rapids.   All three of these teams fit very nicely within the confines of the current CPIFL footprint.  They also give distinct advantages to at least one other team in the league. In this fictitious league Omaha, for example, would have four teams within 3 hours.  How’s that for tidying up the travel budget?  

So here’s one fans plea.  A wish that next season is all about the fan experience, and the bottom line.  Let’s leave past transgressions in the past, and place the ego’s aside, and play by the rules for the betterment of the entire sport.  Let’s renew regional rivalries, re-kindle old hatreds, and impassion fan bases.    Let’s do this, otherwise the harsh reality is that I don’t see the Sioux Falls Storm making it over to the shiny new arena for the 2015 season.

*Please Note*
The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed herein by the the author are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the Sioux Falls Storm or the Indoor Football League, nor do they reflect official policies of the Sioux Falls Storm or the Indoor Football League.