Author: Scott Adamson

Since tackle football is, at its core, an American game, it stands to reason that any pro league would look to American players to fill its rosters. But two years before the World League of American Football did just that, a Texas businessman hoped to flip the script.

Carroll Huntress, a member of the Dallas City Council who had previously coached both college and professional football, announced the formation of the International League of American Football in November, 1989.

“We want to bring a little of American pro football to Europe.” Huntress told the Associated Press. “And we want this to be true nationals, not Americans who might be living in Italy. Our goal is to have no Americans and we think that is an attainable goal in seven to eight years.”

While the World League – set to begin play in 1991 – was designed to serve as a developmental league for the NFL, Huntress said that would not be the case with the ILAF.

The plan was to start with all-American coaching staffs to teach the game, and fill skill positions (two quarterbacks, two running backs, three wide receivers, two linebackers and three defensive backs) with 12 American players per team. Over time, as the European players advanced and tackle football became more common, the United States-based coaches and athletes would be phased out.

“We are not interested in television in the United States,” Huntress said. “Our seats are going to be sold here – not in America. We are negotiating for European TV rights and hope to have a league-wide package, but if we can’t get what we are seeking that way we would negotiate individually in each city. We hope to televise every game.”

The league targeted an April, 1990, start with franchises in Rome, Milan, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Helsinki, Munich, London and Birmingham, England.

Huntress expected to average 15,000 fans per game and even predicted the circuit would turn a profit by its third year (theoretically a realistic goal considering American players would make no more than $500 per game and the European players less than that).

“Europeans are used to fast-moving games and penalty flags can slow down football,” Huntress said. “Our basic premise which we will tell the officials is like the old saying in basketball, ‘No harm, no foul.’”

By December the ILAF was signing players and front office personnel, and in January, 1990, London hired Jack Elway as head coach and Helsinki inked a deal with former New York Jets and New Jersey Generals coach Walt Michaels. Huntress had worked as a Jets assistant under Michaels for five seasons.

The organization seemed to be gaining momentum as its launch date approached, but then things started falling apart – and they fell apart quickly.

In February the teams in Rome and Milan dropped out because of stadium conflicts related to World Cup matches, and on March 1 the ILAF decided to cancel the 1990 season due to issues with work permits for American players. However, league spokesman Steve Gerrish said it would be ready to begin play in 1991.

Unfortunately, it breathed its last before it had a chance to do much breathing at all. On May 2, the International League of American Football folded after it was reported that American financial backers had withdrawn their support.

“This is absolutely shameful,” ILAF general manager Tor Westerberg told AP. “This will really damage the reputation of American businessmen and American sports in Europe.”

The WLAF filled the European tackle football void in London, Barcelona and Frankfurt in 1991, and by the time the league had rebooted as NFL Europe in 1995 it had an all-international lineup of franchises.

As for Huntress’ dream of a mostly European-stocked circuit, that currently exists with the 12-team European League of Football. The ELF mandates that no team can have more than four “A-Players” (American, Canadian, Japanese or Mexican) players on its roster, and a maximum of eight additional foreign athletes.

Remember that time I wrote about the World Football League that existed before the World Football League we all came to know (the latter which forced another World Football League to change its name to Universal Football League)?

Well, guess what?

I found one more.

Yep, aside from the WFL proposed by Louis P. Roberts, the WFL pitched by partners Tony Razzano and Louis S. Goldman and Gary Davidson’s WFL – the only one that actually played – a newspaper publisher in Oklahoma City named Don Pavel also wanted in on the crowded World Football League field.

Davidson’s league was incorporated on August 3, 1973 while Pavel claimed his group had filed paperwork on January 29, 1973.

“I was making feasibility studies then and planned to be ready for the 1975 season,” Pavel, publisher of the MidwestCity Monitor, said in an interview with the Courier-Journal of Louisville on February 5, 1974. “Then this Gary Davidson came along. He incorporated under the name World Football League in August of 1973. That meant I had to get off my you-know-what and be ready by 1974.

“The more Davidson gets that name in headlines, the better for me. Oh, we’ll probably have a lawsuit over that pretty soon now. But I have the papers to show I’d incorporated previous to him.”

The other WFLs all had similar plans – plans that included signing top-quality players to major market teams scattered across the United States and beyond. Pavel said he was eyeing franchises in five U.S. cities (located in Alabama, Oklahoma, Florida, Texas and Kentucky) as well as Mexico City, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Caracas, Venezuela. The league would expand to two European locales in its second season.

The difference in Pavel’s WFL, however, would be that his franchises would sign “local” talent from nearby college teams. If a team was placed in Louisville, he said, then 85 percent of its roster would have to come from the conference the Cardinals played in (at the time, it was the Missouri Valley).

“We don’t have any long, drawn out plan,” Pavel said. “There’d be a tryout camp seven days, then you’ve got a team together.”

Pavel also spoke to the Commercial Appeal of Memphis on February 5, adding an important detail – his WFL had no desire to challenge the NFL for players.

“I don’t want to compete with the National Football League … I don’t think anyone can,” he said. “I want to get into an extended program of football like minor league baseball, so some of the 7,000 kids who don’t get to play when they graduate will go on with their careers.

“We’ll pay good salaries, but it won’t be in terms of $50,000 or $60,000 a year.”

Normally when I research leagues of old (planned or realized), most of them have a concept that looks workable, at least on paper. But this WFL gave me a major “seat-of-the-pants” vibe.

First, there’s the local conference requirement. Where would Mexico City, San Juan, Caracas and two European franchises get their players from?

And if anyone wants to throw a bunch of guys together and call them a team after a week, that tells me they probably haven’t thought this thing through.

“I got into this through my newspaper,” Pavel told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “One of my men said we weren’t getting enough news about football so we wrote the NCAA and they must’ve sent us 90 pounds of material.

“It was then I got the idea (in 1972) that these thousands of college football players never get to play in the NFL. Some of them get asked to try out, but 99 percent aren’t even looked at.”

Pavel was also convinced small crowds would translate to big profits.

“With an average crowd of 10,000, an owner can make a couple of hundred thousand a year,” he said.

Pavel was supposed to announce the franchises in March and hit the field in the summer of 1974, but as you might’ve guessed, that didn’t happen. The only World Football League we were blessed with that year was the wild, wonderful mess spawned by Davidson.

Of course if you want to look on the bright side, Pavel got his wish.

He didn’t want his WFL to compete with the NFL, and it never did.

Even though four games were lopped off the normal 18-game regular season schedule, I was so excited to see the Canadian Football League return in 2021 after losing a season due to the pandemic.

I was hoping for wide-open, high-scoring games, capped off by the Hamilton Tiger-Cats lifting the Grey Cup.

Unfortunately for me, the Ti-Cats had to settle for the silver medal to Winnipeg’s gold (and blue), and high-scoring games were the exception instead of the norm.

Montreal averaged a league-leading 22.4 points per game last season, while Ottawa was last in scoring at 13 points per outing. And at 43.1 ppg combined, scoring was down almost 13 percent from the 2019 campaign.

But perhaps help is on the way.

The CFL announced several rule tweaks earlier in the week, most designed with offense in mind. One with the chance to have the most immediate impact involves moving the hash marks closer to the center of the field. Now, instead of being 24 yards from the nearest sideline, they’ll be 28 yards away.

“Moving the ball closer to center will encourage teams to use the entire field and their entire playbooks,” CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie said. “Our football leaders told us the current hash marks too often had the effect of taking the 12^th man on the field – the receiver on the far side – out of the play. A throw to him was consistently seen as too risky. And that, in turn, was diluting the impact of our huge field, which is perhaps the most unique thing about Canadian football.”

Mike O’Shea, head coach of the two-time defending Grey Cup champion Blue Bombers, is a former linebacker and has a defense-first philosophy. However, he understands why the CFL made changes ahead of the 2022 schedule.

“Offensively, it (the hash mark changes) should open up the playbook a little more and allow you to use the entire field,” O’Shea said during a teleconference on Wednesday. “The hope is, it generates more excitement and I’m sure it’ll have some of the desired effect. It should be more exciting also in a variety of different aspects of the game.

“Nobody wants to watch 9-6, really. I mean, I like 9-6 games, because I’m a defender. But for the most part, the CFL’s a wide-open scoring game.”

Saskatchewan Roughriders coach Craig Dickenson says he likes the measured approach to the alterations, although they might not provide instant gratification.

“Is there a way we can increase scoring and somehow open the game up without drastically, in my opinion, changing things like the ratio? I think that’s why you see the hash marks (moving),” he said during his Thursday teleconference. “Do we know if it’s going to work? No, we don’t, but we’re willing to roll the dice and see what it does. I don’t think it’s going to change the game as we see it. The casual fan may not even notice it.”

Other changes include:

* After a made field goal or single point, drives will start from the 40-yard line instead of the 35-yard line. Teams kicking off for any reason will do so from their 30-yard line instead of the 35-yard line. The only exception is kickoffs following a safety: in 2022 they’ll be made from the 20-yard line instead of the 25-yard line.

* All no yards penalties – which are assigned when the cover team invades a five-yard halo around the returner as he fields a punt – will be 15 yards. Previously, a no yards penalty was 15 yards only if the ball had been fielded in the air – and only five yards if the punt had bounced. Also, any punt that sails out of bounds before it reaches an opponent’s 15-yard line will be assigned a penalty – instead of only punts that sail out of bounds before they reach the 20-yard line.

* Two quarterbacks will be allowed on the field at the same time, provided all other ratio rules are satisfied. 

* A “communications coordinator” from the officiating department, connected to the on-field officials via headset communication, will be imbedded on each team’s bench. 

* A penalty that occurs at the end of the first or third quarter will be assigned at the start of the next quarter, rather than triggering an extension of the quarter. 

* The circumstances under which the Command Centre is allowed to help on-field officials – without a coach’s challenge or an officials’ huddle – will be expanded to include possession rulings, boundary rulings and administrative rules such as a formation without an end or ineligible receivers downfield.

* Introduction of a new objectionable conduct penalty for quarterbacks who “fake” giving themselves up by pretending to initiate a slide while carrying the football. 

* Automatic ejection of any player guilty of two unnecessary roughness penalties or two objectionable conduct penalties (or a combination of the two for infractions that occur following a play).  

Among the “best of the rest” amended rules for 2022, I’m going with the 15-yard penalty that will now be levied when a punt returner’s five-yard halo is broken.

Let’s face it – in years past, it was worth a defender’s while to draw the flag because the penalty was much more palatable than allowing a guy to scoop and scoot.

Now there are consequences.

“Our coaches, general managers and team presidents all agreed that the kick return is an exciting and essential part of the Canadian game,” Ambrosie said. “When teams purposely commit an infraction to prevent any return, it takes away some of the excitement of our game, and it creates a stoppage in play while the penalty is assessed. We wanted to address that.”

As for the other rules, none made me cheer or jeer – although I truly had no idea two QBs couldn’t be on the field at the same time.

For those who wanted a seismic shift in the way the Canadian game is played (Four downs! Eleven players! Horses allowed in the backfield!), I’m sure these adjustments are met with shrugged shoulders. Personally, I think they’re steps in the right direction, even if they’re relatively small ones.

I’m just glad rookie camp opens May 11, training camp starts May 15, and the first preseason game is May 23 with Winnipeg playing at Saskatchewan.

Of course, with the new USFL in action and XFL 3.0 coming next February, football is heading for a year-round schedule.

For me, though, the dawn of the CFL season always feels like the “official” start of football.. And I’m truly looking forward to it – rule changes notwithstanding.