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XFL Rocks on

After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April, it appeared the story of the rebooted XFL was over.

**Scott Adamson writes about alternative football leagues because it makes him happy. Follow him on Twitter @adamsonsl and Instagram @adamsons60**

Instead, a third chapter is apparently about to be written.

The brand that dropped and flopped in 2001 only to return in 2020 – making it through half a season before being halted by the COVOD-19 pandemic – will try again thanks to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Dany Garcia and RedBird Capital Partners.

They were the winning bidders on Monday as the XFL’s parent company, Alpha Entertainment LLC, prepared to go up for auction. However, the group bought the assets for roughly $15 million and the auction was canceled. The deal is expected to be approved at a bankruptcy court hearing on Friday and will become official on August 21.

Garcia, the former wife of Johnson and still his business partner, becomes the first woman to own a professional sports league.

“For Dwayne, (Redbird founder and managing partner Gerry Cardinale) and myself, this property represents an incredible opportunity. It is the confluence of great passion, tradition and possibility” Garcia said in a news release. “Sports and entertainment are the foundations of the businesses I have built. Melding our expertise combined with our commitment to deliver exciting and inspiring unique content, has us all focused on developing the XFL brand into a multi-media experience that our athletes, partners and fans will proudly embrace and love.”

Following the abrupt end to the 2020 season there was reason to believe the league – then owned by professional wrestling mogul Vince McMahon – would return in 2021. But in April most of its employees were laid off and the XFL filed for bankruptcy.

Four months later, it’s back in the game.

“The acquisition of the XFL with my talented partners, Dany Garcia and Gerry Cardinale, is an investment for me that’s rooted deeply in two things – my passion for the game and my desire to always take care of the fans,” Johnson said. “With pride and gratitude for all that I’ve built with my own two hands, I plan to apply these callouses to the XFL, and look forward to creating something special for the players, fans, and everyone involved for the love of football.”

Before it was forced to pull the plug due to the pandemic, the XFL had made a positive impression. The St. Louis BattleHawks and Seattle Dragons were the biggest hits at the box office, with St. Louis averaging 28,541 fans per game and Seattle pulling 25,616. TV ratings were starting to slip a bit but were still respectable, and the quality of play was solid.

It certainly wasn’t on par with the NFL, but saying it was Triple A level pro football is accurate. As for its third go-round, what can we expect?

BRANDING

There’s no reason to think the new owners won’t stick with the “XFL” name, which is a decision I understand but don’t particularly agree with. The acronym is well-known, but so was Windows Vista and I don’t think anyone ever wants to use that operating system again.

And don’t forget the XFL is a circuit that is oh-for-two. The demise of the 2020 version was through no fault of its own, but it doesn’t change the fact that it didn’t reach the finish line.

Even though it won’t happen, I think a rebrand would be well-received from a perception standpoint. After all, the Johnson-Garcia-RedBird deal gave it new life, so why not give it a new identity?

PERSONNEL

As for talent among athletes and coaches, there is plenty to go around. And considering how the Canadian Football League can’t seem to figure out how to deal with its workforce in this summer of uncertainty, there could be plenty more down the road. Unless the CFL gets its act together quickly, American players might choose the XFL in an either/or situation.

While there’ll be no shortage of guys who can get it done on the field, I’ll be interested to see if big names like Bob Stoops and June Jones – who coached in the XFL last season – might want to give it another try. Following its collapse there were reports that the league owed Stoops more than $1 million and Jones nearly $600,000, so those significant financial details would need to be worked out to get them back on the sidelines.

STRUCTURE

Another question concerns the organization itself. Will it retain its single entity format and reboot the eight teams from 2020?

“I think there was a lot to build on,” Garcia told ESPN’s Kevin Seifert on Tuesday, “and not so much a matter of changing it. Any format change would be because of COVID-19. That would be the reason. The roots and the bones of what were there were excellent.”

So there conceivably could be a hub situation if they try to go to market in 2021 and the pandemic still isn’t under control, but even so cities will want teams to call their own. And some additions and subtractions involving franchises wouldn’t surprise me.

They’ll surely bring St. Louis and Seattle back, and I’d also think adding San Diego and San Antonio (cities that drew well during the failed Alliance of American Football experiment in 2019) might be smart moves as well.

Finding a smaller venue for New York if the XFL remains in or near the Big Apple is something to seriously consider. The L.A. Wildcats – located in the nation’s second largest city – had plenty of room at 27,000-seat Dignity Health Sports Park. Met Life Stadium was far too cavernous for the New York Guardians, but 25,000-seat Red Bull Arena in Harrison, New Jersey, would be a nice landing spot for the XFL’s top media market.

And Orlando might be a better fit than Tampa Bay if the league plans to stay in central Florida. Officials now have the advantage of seeing where alternative football was a hit and a miss over the last two years and can plan accordingly.

RULES

Finally, one of the best things about the 2020 XFL was rule innovations. There were many I loved and not a single one I thought was bad, so I hope to see them dust off the rulebook and use it again.

The non-collision kickoffs might become standard in pro football sooner than later, and the “less stall, more ball” tweaks that made games move along more quickly were excellent.

“This is a Hollywood ending to our sale process and it is an exciting new chapter for the league,” XFL President and Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Pollack said. “Dwayne, Dany and Gerry are a dream team ownership group and the XFL is in the best possible hands going forward.”

Whether the XFL can safely start next spring is anyone’s guess. And like all non-NFL pro football leagues in the United States, the odds for sustained success are long.

But for now the XFL is back in business – and that, in itself, qualifies as an upset victory.

Birmingham’s CFL dreams

Anyone remember what you were doing on July 4, 1995?

**Scott Adamson writes about alternative football leagues whenever he feels like it. Follow him on Twitter @adamsonsl and Instagram @adamsons60**

For many of you it was probably just a run-of-the-mill holiday. It likely involved some combination of beer, baked beans and fireworks, because nothing screams “Fourth of July!” like alcohol, gas, and noisy pyrotechnics.

But that particular Independence Day was different for me – and special. It marked the beginning of what I thought would be Birmingham’s first long-term relationship with professional football.

The Birmingham Barracudas opened their inaugural Canadian Football League regular season on the road against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers that night, and I was thrilled. I had to work – I was in my ninth year as sports editor of The Daily Home newspaper in Talladega, Alabama – but the game didn’t kick off until 8:30 p.m. local time.

We’d go to press before the clash ended, so I’d be able to listen to the first half of the radio broadcast in the office and follow the rest of it at home. And I hadn’t been this excited about a tackle football contest in a long, long time.

See, Birmingham natives like me have been jilted plenty of times when it comes to the pro game.

The Birmingham Americans of the World Football League lasted just one season in 1974.

Their WFL replacement – the Vulcans – made it through 12 games in 1975 before expiring along with the rest of the league.

The United States Football League and Birmingham Stallions played from 1983-85, and the World League of American Football’s Birmingham Fire had a two-year run in 1991-92.

The Cudas, I firmly believed, would be nothing like those franchises. All the other teams that had called the Magic City home were in start-up organizations, but the CFL had legs, baby.

Its roots were long and deep and the modern league was officially established in 1958. Aside from the National Football League, there was no other pro gridiron circuit in North America with that kind of staying power. It had great tradition, unique rules and I thought it was a perfect match.

“Fans have supported the teams that were here before,” Birmingham coach Jack Pardee, who coached the WFL Florida Blazers and USFL Houston Gamblers, said during a preseason news conference. “The leagues have been the failures, not the teams, and that’s why I’m here. At my age (58) and experience, I didn’t care about pioneering again.”

So this July 4 would be a day to celebrate not just America’s birthday, but the day Canada gifted Birmingham a new and long life in professional football.

Details of the game don’t matter – but I’ll provide some anyway.

Birmingham won, 38-10, racking up 31 first half points including pick sixes courtesy of Andre Strode and Junior Thurman.

Jimmy Klingler was filling in for starting quarterback Matt Dunigan, who was sidelined with a finger injury, and connected on a 95-yard touchdown pass in the blowout.

It was the first of 18 regular season games but I knew there’d be countless more to come because – for the first time – Birmingham was in an established league.

But as I found out before the calendar flipped to 1996 (and after Birmingham finished 10-9 with a first round playoff loss to the San Antonio Texans), it’s called the Canadian Football League for a reason.

Except for the Baltimore Stallions, most American fans were rather cool to the idea of CFL football being played in their backyards. Still, when I heard people suggest there were financial issues and it might not cut it in the Lower 48, I simply put my fingers in my ears and shouted, “La, la, la.”

I didn’t want to hear it, even though it was true (and even though as a sports writer I should’ve taken off my maple leaf colored glasses).

While the CFL brain trust thought expansion to the United States would be a boon it ultimately proved to be a bust, and threatened to drag the league down with it if the chord wasn’t cut.

Baltimore (1994-95), the Shreveport Pirates (1994-95) and the Sacramento Gold Miners (1993-94) were the only American-based CFL teams to last more than a year.

The Barracudas, Texans (relocated from Sacramento), and Memphis Mad Dogs were one and done in 1995, and the Las Vegas Posse played a lone season in 1994.

When the league kicked off the 1996 campaign it was back to nine teams – all based in Canada.

Was I naïve to think the Barracudas would survive and thrive a quarter century ago?

Yes.

Would I be naïve to think Birmingham will ever keep professional football on a long-term basis?

Yes.

Since the failed CFL experiment, Birmingham has been home to the XFL Bolts and Alliance of American Football Iron. The Freedom Football League – should it ever get off the ground – is supposed to have a team in Birmingham nicknamed the Kings.

But really, the end of the Cudas marked the end of my confidence that the Magic City will ever find a forever home in a professional football league.

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me seven times, shame on me.

Aussie Rules football growing in U.S.

**The USAFL fields amateur clubs all across the country./photo courtesy of the USAFL**

Those of us who are men and women of a certain age remember ESPN before it came of age.

When the fledgling network went on the air in 1979 it had no rights to major American sporting events, so there were tractor pulls and talk shows to fill up airtime. However, it was the broadcast of Victorian Football League matches that opened up a whole new world for fans like me.

Australian Rules football (now playing under the Australian Football League umbrella after abandoning the VFL brand in 1989) is a wonderful hybrid of American football, Gaelic football, rugby, soccer and bar fight. After being introduced to the game by the “Worldwide Leader In Sports” I remained interested even after ESPN shifted its attention to what United States fans considered more traditional athletic competition.

Still, I often wondered how “footy” might be received if there were clubs not just in places like Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide but New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Philadelphia.

Turns out there’s no need to wonder.

Although currently sidelined by the COVID-19 pandemic like many other sports, the United States Australian Football League has been around for 25 years. Introduced in 1996 and featuring amateur clubs from coast to coast, the USAFL helps coordinate men’s, women’s and junior programs across the country.

“2021 will be the USAFL’s 25th season, and we’ve gone from six teams in 1997 to 46 this year from Maine to Hawaii, with a couple in development hoping to join the league in the next few months,” USAFL media manager Brian Barrish said. “In the league’s early days, there were a lot of clubs in the Midwest and in California/Arizona. The upper Midwest is probably the most active, with clubs in Columbus, Cincinnati, Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, Madison/Milwaukee, Minnesota, and Des Moines thriving. The game has also grown in Texas (Austin, Houston, Dallas), and in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle and Portland). Recently, we’re starting to see a big push to get clubs started in the Southeast, which only had three or four clubs for the longest time.

“New teams have sprung up in Savannah, Jacksonville, Tampa, Rome (Georgia), and Richmond, to go with our established clubs in Atlanta, Raleigh, and Ft. Lauderdale.”

At first glance Aussie Rules football seems like organized chaos, but the basic rules of the pro game aren’t that difficult to follow.

The field is a huge oval (between 148 and 202 yards long and 120 to 170 yards wide).

“Finding spaces for us to play has its challenges; essentially you need to find an open space that is big enough for us to build a field that doesn’t have too many holes or baseball diamonds surrounding it,” Barrish said. “I’ve called matches and played on everything from polo grounds to public parks to the infield of a harness track (Rosemont Raceway in Maryland, to be exact). For regular season play, we just set out cones (they call them witch’s hats in Australia) for the field and the squares, and then make posts out of PVC pipes fitted over metal stakes. That last part is a bit of a complication sometimes as some parks don’t like you making holes in their field, even if they’re small and manageable. But, most teams usually have two or three places to play in case of scheduling issues and last-minute issues such as weather.”

Games are contested by teams made up of 18 players per side and a match is divided into four 20-minute quarters.

Four posts are located at each end of the field; a kick between the two taller middle posts scores a goal – worth 6 points – while one that goes between the two outer and shorter posts scores 1 point, known as a behind.

Single points are also scored if a ball goes through any of the posts without being kicked by the attacking team (say it comes off the hands of a player on either team or is kicked by a defender) or if the defense forces the ball between the posts it’s defending.

In terms of advancing the ball, teams do so by kicking or hand-passing, and players with possession of the ball and can run no more than 16 yards while holding it before bouncing it off the ground.

OK, now that I’ve written it down it does look difficult to follow, but if you familiarize yourself with the rules and watch a few matches, it all starts to make sense.

“In terms of players, we have everyone from Aussie ex-pats to Americans who saw the game on TV years ago and wanted to try their hand at it,” Barrish explained. “Recruiting looks very different from club to club, depending on everything from the number of colleges to the bar scene and everything in between. There are a lot of Australians that are over here for work, school, or family. The Americans have come through word of mouth or having seen the game in Australia, among other ways. Just under 75 percent of our players, however, are American. Roughly 25 percent are Australian. And while we haven’t grown in the total number players as much as we would like, the fact that we’ve gone from a mostly ex-pat Australian league to a mostly American program is a big win in my book. Helping this is our rule that at least 50 percent of the players on the field for a USAFL game must be American (or ‘National’ players). This requires teams to actively recruit locally and help grow the game at the grassroots level and not simply ‘import’ Aussies.”

More Americans playing, of course, means more have the chance to excel at the game.

“It’s worth mentioning that we have at least one team – the Des Moines Roosters – that is completely American,” Barrish said. “Ninety percent of our women players are American, which is fantastic for the growth and helpful for growing a pathway to play at the AFLW level, as evidenced by Dani Marshall’s signing with the Western Bulldogs this year.”

Although the formation and function of clubs varies from town to town, a sense of community is a common denominator. The roots of the game and its history help bring the teams and players together.

In addition, the AFL provides the USAFL with a yearly grant that assists in operations.

“We are also in constant communication with them about our development and about promoting the game on both sides of the Pacific,” Barrish said. “The inspiration for club culture comes from the regional Aussie Rules clubs in Australia. Many of the teams were founded by Australians who played in those clubs and wanted to establish them under similar principles to what they had back home. I got the chance to travel with the U.S. teams to Melbourne for the 2017 AFL International Cup, and we were hosted by several local clubs during the two weeks we were there. There were post-training meals, pre-game gatherings, and a real sense of family there. In the mountain town of Montrose, for example, there were people who had been a part of the club in some capacity for 50-plus years, and whose children and grandchildren had grown up playing for the team. We’re talking the equivalent of AA or AAA baseball here, but there is a lot of local pride here.

“What I will say, having been around just about every club in the league, is that each one has a different dynamic. But, it’s all positive, and it’s all about growing something sustainable. We’re not like, say, softball leagues, where we get together once a week, play a game, have a beer and go home. We celebrate Australia Day, we have ANZAC Day commemorations, and many of our clubs have social and fundraising events throughout the year. And it is really like a family, both on the club and at the national level.”

So could there come a day when Aussies Rules clubs develop a pay-for-play model?

“I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility,” Barrish said. “The big issue would be finding facilities that could host full-on matches. I know there is talk of someone building a bunch of cricket stadia across the country and that would be a great way to add more events to those facilities. In the absence of that, it would need to be in a smaller format. The AFL tested something called AFLX over the last two years – it was played on soccer fields with modified rules, a la Rugby 7s. Something like that would work for a league or a touring competition here. What that would look like, I don’t know; do you have players at the top of their game coming over to live and play in the States? Do you bring over retired players a la the Big 3 Basketball and mix in American players who have come up through the USAFL, or converted athletes?”

As far as Barrish is concerned, the USAFL remains the best way to showcase a sport that features highly skilled athletes playing a crowd-pleasing game.

“I’m a big believer in the growth of the grass roots effort that the USAFL has laid down over the past quarter of a century,” he said. “It would be great if that got more attention on both sides of the Pacific before anything semi-pro or professional emerged. We need more people, specifically more locals, being involved in the sport in order to be successful, and the focus should be on that first.”

For more information on the league, go to www.usafl.com.