Category: History and More

Let me be among the first to spread the rumor that the Carolina Panthers will move to London and play their home games at Wembley Stadium.

Sure, it’s probably a ridiculous rumor, but we live in a ridiculous world where truth is optional, so I’m gonna go with it.

Jerry Richardson, who made his coin in the food services industry and owns the Charlotte-based NFL team, announced that he was selling the franchise at the end of the season.

It was an abrupt move and comes on the heels of workplace misconduct allegations against the 81-year old; the NFL is currently investigating the charges.

Richardson didn’t mention the allegations in his statement about the sale, but Sports Illustrated published an article detailing them. Let’s just say they mostly fall into the “creepy, sexist, racist old man” category and move on to the main point of this column, which is expansion of pro football’s biggest league beyond the United States.

Commissioner Roger Goodell insists that the circuit doesn’t like to move teams, but he and his cabal of owners must not hate it too much.

This season alone the Rams returned to Los Angeles from St. Louis and the Chargers left San Diego for L.A., the city they started in as an American Football League franchise in 1960.

And the Oakland Raiders are heading to Las Vegas, probably no later than 2019.

But as much talk as there’s been about a team in London – and there’s been a lot – no situation has existed that made a move across the pond as likely.

Until now.

The Panthers have been in the NFL for 22 seasons, played in two Super Bowls, and have established themselves as a solid franchise in a thriving city with a nice fan base.

But …

The Panthers are still “young” in the sense that their roots and legacy do not date back to the formative days of the NFL. While the rest of the league’s owners would recoil at the suggestion the Bears move from Chicago or the Giants from New York/New Jersey, uprooting a modern expansion team and sending it to England might seem more palatable.

Now before I push this theory any further, let me say I think placing a franchise in London – or anywhere overseas – is ridiculous as a standalone move.

Scheduling will be a nightmare and create a huge hardship on players based in London, who would have to make transatlantic flights eight times over a 16-game regular season schedule.

Logistically, it makes no sense.

If the NFL wanted to do it right, it would need to expand to at least 40 teams and create two, five-team international divisions. It still wouldn’t be perfect, but far more reasonable than having one outlier.

A number of suitors are already lining up and I assume most who come along will want to keep the team in the Carolinas. As someone who lives in Greenville, South Carolina, I truly hope that happens.

Although I’m a Jets fan, it’s much more convenient to drive 100 miles to Bank of America Stadium on a Sunday morning than to make the 718-mile trek to MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.

And despite music mogul P Diddy’s tongue-in-cheek interest in buying what he calls the “North Carolina Panthers,” Richardson said there will be no negotiations or inquiries about the sale until the end of this season.

By the looks of things, that season will extend beyond 16 games. The Panthers are 10-4 and currently situated as a No. 5 seed in the NFC playoff picture.

When it does end, though, it’ll be interesting to see if any kind of London-based group is in play.

Back in September Mark Waller, the NFL’s executive vice president of its international division, suggested that having a team in London by 2022 was a distinct possibility.

“Absolutely,” Waller told Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated. “And that aligns well from a CBA and union standpoint—that would need to be part of a union agreement. Not to say we couldn’t bargain it separately, but obviously if we’re doing it around that time, that would make sense.”

The 2022 season is still off in the distance, but come January (or early February) there will be only one franchise in a position to make the move.

And here’s a little tidbit for you; that team is contractually obligated to stay in Charlotte only until June, 2019.

I wonder if anyone has already copyrighted London Panthers?

(This column was originally published on Dec. 13, 2017).

Back when I worked for a living, I used to talk about the Canadian Football League so much that it became a bit of a joke among my fellow sports writers.

Since the colleges in my primary orbit were Clemson, South Carolina and Georgia, I could always be counted on to stay on top of which Tigers, Gamecocks and Bulldogs were in the CFL.

And as a UAB graduate, I keep a close on any Blazers who might find their way onto rosters as “internationals.”

Thing is, the CFL is not a novelty for me. I legitimately love it.

You might remember the league tried its “American experiment” a couple of decades ago in which franchises were placed in the United States. Personally, I thought the plan was terrific and had high hopes it would last.

Of course, it didn’t.

The CFL is not just a league of unique rules, it’s also very Canadian culturally, and the feng shui of tackle football dictates that the CFL have teams in Canadian cities only.

I get that, and respect it.

But since I now have a lot of free time on my hands, I’ve used an inordinate amount of it thinking about professional sports leagues that I would like to form.

One is the Global Football League, which I’ll address in a future column.

But the one nearest and dearest to my heart is the one I’ll write about today – the American League of Canadian Football.

Yep, the ALCF would bring the Canadian pro game to the Lower 48, giving Americans their own version of the CFL.

That means the ALCF would adopt most of the rules used by the CFL, such as:

• A playing field 110 yards long and 65 yards wide.
• Goal posts situated on the goal line.
• Three downs to make 10 yards and a first down.
• Twelve players to a side (extra slotback on offense, extra secondary player on defense).
• All backs allowed in motion toward the line of scrimmage.
• No fair catches on punt returns.
• Fumbled balls that go out of bounds belong to the last team to touch the ball.
• Kicking teams awarded a single point for missed field goals or punts that are downed in the end zone by the receiving team.
• Players who line up behind the kicker on a punt or field goal try may recover an “onside” kick.

Now remember I said the ALCF would adopt most rules of the CFL. One change would be the depth of end zones, which span 20 yards in the CFL. This was a problem that plagued the American experiment since many stadiums were not built to accommodate such lengthy playing fields.

So, while 20-yard deep end zones are desirable, teams will have to improvise and just make them as deep as possible (just think about the varied sizes of outfields in baseball and it makes better sense).

OK, now that we’ve got the rules set, we have to select cities.

This is the tough part.

When most leagues are formed, the first order of business is to get teams in major media markets for the purposes of advertising and TV revenue. Problem is, it’ll be impossible for the ALCF to compete with cities that field NFL teams.

So we won’t.

Instead, the 10-team ALCF will place its flagship franchises in Birmingham, Memphis, Norfolk, Orlando, Portland, Rochester, Sacramento, San Antonio, Tulsa and Wichita.

I’ve even gone to the trouble of giving the teams nicknames for you: Birmingham Battalion, Memphis Blues, Norfolk Mariners, Orlando Coasters, Portland Brews, Rochester Boom, Sacramento Rivermen, San Antonio Sol, Tulsa Oilers and Wichita Flight.

Following the CFL model, each team would play two exhibition games before embarking on an 18-game regular season that begins in June of each year. And, like their Canadian counterparts, the average salary for an ALCF player would be roughly $80,000 per season.

Am I the only person who has dreamed of such a league?

Maybe not.

I’m a member of a great Facebook group, “CFL Fans In SEC Country,” which features hardcore, knowledgeable fans – some who even venture to the Grey Cup every year.

But are there enough of them to put down seed money for the ALCF and make me commissioner?

That’s another story.

If they can pull it off, though, we’ll all have a helluva party when the Battalion hosts the Blues in the 2020 season opener.

It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally bias and logic line up perfectly.

So on Tuesday when I received my Football Writers Association of America ballot for the 2017 Eddie Robinson Coach of the Year Award, I voted for UAB’s Bill Clark.

And it was an easy decision.

Yes, I’m a UAB grad.

Yes, every Saturday during this college football season the only game I had a rooting interest in was the one involving the Blazers.

Yes, a big green flag with a dragon on it waves in front of my house throughout the scholastic year – a sign of my support for my alma mater in all sports.

Go ahead and accuse me of being a UAB fan because I am one.

But here’s the thing … voting for Clark shows no bias at all. In fact, it’s the logical choice.

I don’t know if he’ll win the FWAA honor, but he should – and he’s going to get a lot of votes from a lot of people who never gave UAB football a passing thought before it became impossible to ignore.

This is a team that heads to the Bahamas Bowl with an 8-4 record, despite not playing for two full seasons. That’s almost unbelievable.

Why?

Well, when school president Ray Watts coldly and cruelly shut the program down after a 6-6 campaign in 2014 (Clark’s first year at the helm), UAB football was quickly gutted.

Many of the players who helped the Blazers recover from the nightmarish regimes of Neil Callaway and Garrick McGee scattered to other schools (you’re welcome, South Alabama), and there was certainly no reason for Clark to hang around.

He could’ve cut and run after the ax fell and been an immediate success almost anywhere else, probably as a highly paid Power 5 assistant. Who knows, he might have even landed at a place with a trustworthy president and a board of trustees that wanted to help instead of hurt.

But a lot of hell-raising, cash-raising fans and big money Birmingham business leaders helped prompt Clark – a man of faith ­– to take a leap of faith and stay.

And when, against all odds, Blazer football was reinstated, Clark was ready to get to work.

And soon he was standing in front of a handful of holdovers and hopefuls, young men who were already special because they committed to being part of something special.

But let’s be realistic. Taking two years off in the Football Bowl Subdivision is not a recipe for success. Just ask SMU how long it takes to recover from the death penalty.

So 2017 was much more than a rebuilding project, it was a hard reboot. And talking as a fan, if UAB had finished 1-11 or 2-10, I wouldn’t have been at all discouraged.

I said the before the season started I’d be thrilled with a 4-8 record because that was the worksheet that seemed most realistic.

Clark thought otherwise.

He knew otherwise.

He convinced the kids that they were far better than even their biggest supporters believed, and before long they were proving everybody wrong.

These guys had absolutely no business whatsoever registering eight victories, yet they did. And while they didn’t win a division title or play for any kind of championship, no team in the country rose from nothing to something like the Blazers did.

And no coach in the country did a better job than Clark.

Sure, there are plenty of solid coach of the year nominees.

Lane Kiffin showed he was more than just an epic Tweeter when he turned a 3-9 Florida Atlantic team into the 10-3 Conference USA champions.

Army’s Jeff Monken has led the Black Knights to eight wins heading into this weekend’s showdown with Navy.

Scott Frost – right before he was named the new head coach at Nebraska – guided Central Florida to a 12-0 mark and will coach the Knights against Auburn in the Peach Bowl. A win there and UCF will finish as the only team in the FBS with a perfect record.

Lincoln Riley has Oklahoma in the College Football Playoff in his first season; Kirby Smart has Georgia in the CFP in his second; Fresno State’s Jeff Tedford transformed his Bulldogs from a toothless team to one with both bark and bite; and reigning national championship boss Dabo Swinney continues to build a dynasty at Clemson.

All of these coaches have done remarkable jobs.

Only one, however,  brought a program back to life.

So if you want to accuse me of voting for Clark as my choice for coach of the year because I’m biased, I’ll offer no defense.

But if you don’t think he’s the logical choice, maybe you’re dealing with some biases of your own.