Talk of any new football league always gets my Spidey senses tingling, and six years ago they were set off by the birth of the Freedom Football League.
Ricky Williams, the Heisman Trophy winner out of Texas and a veteran of 12 NFL seasons, announced the creation of the FFL on an episode of ESPN’s Outside the Lines program.
“The purpose of this league is about community and the development of players,” Williams said during the December 6, 2018 broadcast. “In thinking about creating this league, I wanted to create a league that I could have stayed in and been comfortable and really thrived. The NFL started a long time ago, and since then a lot of things have changed. And we want to create a league that’s ready for that change and invite some more of it.”
I’d long been a fan a Williams, a tremendous athlete who is also an intellectual. And he’s a guy who cheerfully marches to the beat of his own drummer. Having him out front of this new venture made me interested.
What interested me even more was that 10 teams – complete with nicknames – had already been identified.
Set to begin play in the spring of 2019 were the Birmingham Kings, Connecticut Underground, Florida Strong, Oakland Panthers, Ohio Players, Oklahoma City Power, Portland Progress, San Diego Warriors, St. Louis Independence, and Texas Revolution. No players, owners, staffs or stadiums had been lined up, but hey – those were just details, right?
Terrell Owens and Simeon Rice were also involved with the FFL’s formation, and Byron Chamberlain, Jeff Garcia and Dexter Jackson were among the 100 stakeholders.
The idea was that the league would not only be a showcase for players’ talent, but a platform for their viewpoints as well. It was formed two years after San Francisco 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick – who protested police brutality and racial injustice by kneeling during the playing of the national anthem – was basically blackballed by NFL owners.
The first FFL press release stated that the circuit was founded on four philosophical and operational pillars:
1. Ensuring players receive permanent and reliable holistic health and wellness support on and off the field, seeking to avoid physical and financial exploitation that is commonplace in both collegiate and professional football today.
2. Amplifying the voices of athletes by relentlessly pursuing unity and encouraging athletes to address society’s challenges relating to social justice, wealth disparity, health and wellness and more hot-button issues they are passionate about.
3. Reimagining the game for fans by creating a new spectator experience that leverages technology and embraces innovation, while simultaneously eliminating price-gouging to make loyalty and game-attendance affordable again.
4. Establishing economic justice via financial incentives through joint ownership and further eliminating financial exploitation and profiteering to the benefit of the few at the expense of many.
“The Freedom Football League is the perfect integration of my passion for social justice, economic equality and health and wellness, with my life-long dedication and love for professional football,” Williams said. “As much as I’d like to throw on the pads and play, this league is designed to bring competitive football back to the masses, providing players and fans alike with the economic benefits of owning stake in a team, while also ensuring players are empowered to use their public platform for social good.”
Player/public ownership and the green light to speak out on social justice were noble ideas, but details on the football-side of the FFL were sketchy. Would it try to compete with the NFL for players or be a minor league? Would the games be nationally televised? What kind of innovative rules would be utilized?
I contacted the league at the time to get answers to these questions, but none came. Instead, there was a videotaped “Founders Roundtable” that revealed, well, very little that hadn’t already been stated in the initial press release.
Later, the FFL website posted thumbnail sketches on each of the clubs. The Kings’ home city was described as a place “where Martin Luther King preached, and where Rosa Parks sat. Birmingham epitomizes the style and substance of the league.”*
* I hated to be “that guy,” but I emailed the FFL to let them know Parks’ iconic refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white man happened in Montgomery, not Birmingham, and to their credit they reworded the reference.
Anyway, as 2018 stretched into 2019, there were random name changes of the teams. The Kings became the Alabama Airmen, the Progress rebranded as the Portland Power, the Austin Revolution morphed into the Texas Revolution and St. Louis no longer has a nick – that would be for the fans to decide.
Thing is, none of these markets had actually made any kind of deal to host a team.
I continued to request info and made a point to frequently check the website, but it became obvious by the turn of the decade the FFL was dead in the water. The last update came in 2021 and if you to go to it now, all you get is a weird domain full of gibberish.
Thus, I think we can safely say that the Freedom Football League has officially joined a long line of alternative gridiron organizations that never made it past the concept stage.
And that’s a shame, because if nothing else it would’ve been cool to see the Ohio Players perform Fire and Love Rollercoaster at halftime of an Ohio Players game.