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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?
*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.
