Everbody knows spring football leagues are doomed when they try to compete with the mighty NFL. Everybody, that is, except Alliance of American Football (AAF) co-founder Charlie Ebersol.
The new eight-team spring football league co-founded by Ebersol and former NFL/ESPN front office insider Bill Polian is off to a strong start through Week 5.
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The sports media world and Madison Avenue sat up and took notice when TV ratings for the AAF's broadcast debut on CBS equaled that of an NBA game telecast on ABC. With NFL castoffs such as Trent Richardson and Steve Spurrier finding a second life, the quality of play has been good in a league where players only earn $75,000 a season.
The AAF has even drawn raves from NFL insiders such as Rich Eisen of NFL Network for injecting more tranparency into instant replay calls. There are signs that the NFL may allow its younger players to get more on-field experience by playing in the AAF, according to Michael David Smith of ProFootballTalk.
Americans love a comeback story. Rather than trying to compete with the NFL, Ebersol is smartly positioning the AAF as a second-chance league that gives NFL washouts, near-misses and hopefuls another crack at redemption.
On the other hand, the news that NHL owner Tom Dundon made a big money investment in the AAF shortly after the league's Feb. 9 kickoff raised plenty of eyebrows. David Glenn of The Athletic reported that the new league was in danger of missing payroll. Ebersol counters that it was an extraordinary large investment by an investor who's committed to the future of the league.
The 36-year old Ebersol is the son of legendary NBC Sports guru Dick Ebersol and actress Susan Saint James. While still a college student at Notre Dame in 2004, a badly burned Ebersol dragged his unconscious father from the wreckage of a plane crash that tragically killed his younger brother Teddy and two others.
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The documentary filmmaker went on to direct ESPN's "This Was the XFL" about his father and WME boss Vince McMahon's failed attempt to create a spring football league in 2001.
So is AAF already in jeopardy? Was Dundon's $250 milllion a cash infusion or a bailout? And will the billionaire investor's deep pockets ensure years of future solvency for the lean and mean startup? Especially once McMahon's reborn XFL kicks off in 2020?
Sporting News recently talked with Ebersol about the past, present and future of the AAF. Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
SPORTING NEWS: The AAF has kicked off to mostly positive reviews. Your thoughts so far?
CHARLIE EBERSOL: The football is pretty good. I’m pretty excited about that. Ultimately, quality of football is always the primary focus. I would argue Bill Polian has done an extraordinary job of delivering on his promise. We’re pretty happy with it. ... One of the things that we always wanted to say is, ultimately, could you create a game that really felt like the NFL? Or people right on the cusp of the NFL?
SN: Isn't that what doomed the original XFL back in 2001? When you got past the cheeleaders, and the catchy "He Hate Me" player nicknames, the product on the field stunk.
CE: You're 100 percent right. ... Ultimately, good football markets itself. So we haven’t had to go out into the marketplace and spend millions of dollars to tell people about our league — because as soon as people saw the football they started marketing it for us. One of the things we’re really hyper-focused on is letting the people be the drivers of the excitement. That has paid off for us.
SN: Let me play devil's advocate. No spring football league has survived — ever. Not the XFL in 2001, not the USFL in the '80s, not the World Football League in the '70s. Bruce Jenkins of the San Franciso Chronicle wrote that the AAF is "doomed to failure." Your response?
CE: (Laughs). Hey, listen, everyone who’s tried to do this before has failed. Bill Polian and I did not go into this business thinking this was going to be sunshine and rainbows. We had a healthy amount of skepticism, even ourselves, about what would happen. Ultimately, having (new chairman) Tom Dundon get involved ... I tell people my favorite thing he’s ever said to me is when he first called me. He said, "I’ve been watching you for a while. I know you’re a tech start-up. And you’re trying to do all this other stuff. But let me ask you a question. Do you want to keep raising money in Series A and Series B and Series C? Or do you want to just raise Series Infinity right now — and be funded for life?" I said, "I’ve never heard of Series Infinity — but I’m in. Show me where to sign." I was like, "You don’t mind if I trademark that and start selling it on T-shirts?"
✌️ TD's on the night for Trent Richardson! @aafiron | #MEMvsBHM pic.twitter.com/YZklJW7wfV
— The Alliance (@TheAAF) February 10, 2019
SN: How would you describe Dundon's $250 million? A cash infusion? A bailout? What?
CE: It was an extraordinary large investment. Let’s start there. If you take the conversation out of "startup football," and you just use the word startup, this company has actually existed as an actual company for about 13 months. In 13 months we raised multiple hundreds of millions of dollars. Tom put a quarter billion dollars into the company. If you ask any startup in (Silicon) Valley, if you ask Uber or Lyft or Apple, any of these companies, that level of investment at this stage is extraordinary. From our perspective in the sports world, we’re used to hearing billions. But we started as a very small company 13 months ago. We’ve grown into a company where a very seasoned and intelligent and systematic investor like Tom was willing to write a quarter of a billion dollar check. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever had to defend the viability of a company that had just received a quarter billion dollars.
SN: What does a check for a quarter billion look like?
CE: (Laughs) Tom showed up my house with this six-foot-wide check. It was Publisher’s Clearinghouse.
SN: Bottom Line: What does $250 million buy you? Three, four, five years of operations?
CE: It’s bigger than that. What Tom offers is not just capital. He offers infrastructure. Keep in mind that all of the serious people who’ve tried to do this before me had serious infrastructure behind them. The World League. NFL Europe. The XFL had NBC and the WWE. When we started this It was just Bill and I. Thirteen months ago Bill and I had one employee. Today we have over 1,100. Running a company with 1,100 employees, regardless of what they’re doing, takes a very specific set of skills. But the systems he’s able to put in, the procedures. It’s saving us tens of millions of dollars. So we have the ability to build a much better version of this company. As he describes it, we built the company up to adolescence. Now he’s matured us into an adult. ... He has decades of corporate governance experience at building companies of this size and growing them. We feel pretty good.
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SN: What role can legalized sports betting play in the success of the AAF?
CE: Because of the success of Opening Weekend people have started to take certain things for granted. But think about how crazy that is. Thousands of people are betting on a game — and a league — that did not exist (last summer). And they’re betting on that. So right there, that’s great. Gambling is one of a handful of engagement tools that we feel very strongly about. One of the reasons we built our game the way we did is that football’s greatest value is that it’s the only four-quadrant piece of entertainment in the U.S. It’s the only thing where Mom, Dad, Billy and Sue all watch together at the same time. It’s crucial to us. ... We offer all our materials to people who want to do gambling and want to have the ability to do gambling. But at the same time recognizing we have a unique advantage here, where we can give access to a sport that we already know people are excited about and want to be a part of in a unique and new way. I think that’s where we really excited.
SN: Like the original XFL with the SkyCam that was later adopted by the NFL, you guys have been smart about technology. I love how you give TV viewers an inside look at instant replay decisions. It's the kind of transparency we need more of in TV sports. Will technology be your killer app?
CE: I jokingly told (AAF officiating consultants) Mike Pereira and Dean Blandino that they just wrote themselves out of jobs. The two of them, and Bill Polian, came together and said they have this great idea to do this. I said, "It's a fantastic idea. But if the NFL ends up liking this, I don’t know how you get to keep your gig." Ultimately, that’s the genius of what Bill Polian has created. He’s found the very best people who’ve done this. Look at my group. Every one of our head coaches has NFL experience. ... Half of the referees that are in our league are currently in the official development program for the NFL.
Everything around this league is about recreating and tapping into the NFL. Look, people keep saying the word developmental like’s it’s a dirty word. Developmental is a great word. We’re not just developmental for players. We see ourselves as developmental for coaches, for officials, for everybody involved in our league. We are doing something here to make the ecosystem of football better. We do it by being the ultimate professional version. This is not a marketing stunt. This is not some opportunity for a college coach to figure out if they’ve got what it takes in the NFL. We’re saying to our players and everybody else: We want to get you back to the NFL. We’re going to give you the best path to do that.
SN: Who are your early standouts?
CE: Clearly, Steve Spurrier (head coach of the Orlando Apollos). He’s been fantastic. (Running back) Trent Richardson (of the Birmingham Iron) is one of those stories that I’m deeply excited about. He gave an interview a couple of days ago. I read it and called him. I said, "Trent, you almost had me in tears. You are the epitome of what we’re trying to do here, which is giving players the ability to rewrite their stories, start from scratch and do something different." I hear him say how he never played football for himself before. He always did it for other people. Now he’s doing it for himself and the love of the game. That’s extraordinary. Obviously, (quarterback) Garrett Gilbert of Orlando is showing everybody why he should be playing in the NFL. I think that’s great. That’s what we’re trying to do. There’s players nobody is paying attention to. John Wolford is the starting quarterback of the Arizona Hotshots. Left a job in finance to take one last shot at football. He’s proven that it was worthwhile. Look, we want to graduate a huge amount of these guys to the NFL this year. And it looks like we’re going to.
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SN: How would you describe the relationship between you and the NFL?
CE: Evolving. Obviously, we are on their network. We worked closely with them to create a contract that allows players to really move back to the NFL as we did with Josh Johnson. We work closely with them on our tech platform so that it matches up. Basically, everybody on my competition committee either currently serves or did serve on the NFL competition committee. We’re trying to create a symbiotic environment, where everybody within the system is getting the benefit of being in the NFL system. I think to a very large degree it’s been working.
SN: Will both the AAF and XFL survive? Or will the weaker go under?
CE: It’s impossible for me to talk about another business. What I know is I’m sitting in a place today that’s very different from where I sat at any point in time. I have a new chairman of the board in Tom Dundon who is committed to a very long-term business plan. Every business he’s walked into, he has not only succeeded but he has far surpassed expectations. When the guy was 20-something years old, he built a multibillion business. ... So from my perspective, we are in a unique place to win. One thing that Bill Polian always says: If you put a team together that’s focused on themselves, and is focused on the team, you win the Super Bowl. If you put a team together that’s focused on the competition, you don’t make it to the playoffs.
SN: What are your thoughts so far on TV ratings?
CE: Well beyond what we ever thought. Looking at our ratings compared to other, well-established big leagues. ... One of the differences between now and 17 years ago with my dad and Vince, for them to succeed, for them to justify spending tens of millions on marketing and $12 million on fireworks and all this other stuff, for them to justify that, they had to pop a massive rating and they had to maintain that rating. We’re the exact opposite. We did this entirely organically, entirely through word of mouth. And we had a phenomenal partner in CBS. Then going into Week 2, with the NFL Network and TNT, they gave us what their internal expectations were. When the ratings came out, they were flabbergasted. Again, this is organic. We’re doing no off-air marketing. So people are finding this on their own. Over a million people per game are engaging with the app. We had 3.5 million people on our platform, watching the video and playing the game. Those are professional league numbers. Not a developmental or a minor league engagement. That’s more viewers than most pro sports do on TV. And we’re doing it on iPhones.
SN: Are any new corporate sponsors coming in?
CE: You’re going to see a lot of new commercials (and sponsors). One of them is At Home. It’s funny, we picked our eight markets based on a lot of different factors. We firmly believed we didn’t want to be in the big eight markets. Because we wanted to give people something they would want to be part of Day One. You don’t go to New York because you don’t want to compete with the Knicks, Rangers, Islanders, Nets, etc. But also from a brand perspective you want to be in a situation where brands are really connecting with the audience. So the CEO of At Home came to the Opening Night game in San Antonio. Feeling that energy, and seeing who our demographic was, he came back to us. So we’ve got an exciting deal there. There’s a handful of other sponsors that you’ll start to see throughout the game. But we will not increase the amount of commercial time. ... We’ll still be able to deliver a 2 1/2-hour game because of how we structured the ads. We don’t want the fans to pay for our success by costing them more time. We actually build it around our existing infrastructure. So no matter how successful we are, we will protect our fans’ experience.
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SN: Bottom Line: Will AAF be here in 5 years?
CE: You know, I’m very superstitious. I wake up every morning trying to figure out how we continue to succeed. I will say what Tom Dundon said. He does not start businesses A) to bail or B) to sell. So his expectation in coming in and putting in the kind of money he put in is that we are not only committed to but we are expecting to be here in seven, 10, 15 years. I’m pretty confident based on what we’ve built that’s going to be the case. The short answer to your question is yes. The long answer is we wouldn’t be doing this if we thought (this wouldn’t last).
Room to improve at 5-0? Steve Spurrier and the Apollos have high expectations.
— The Alliance (@TheAAF) March 11, 2019
📰 | https://t.co/Q5xs7spaGZ pic.twitter.com/I8uPub6GwU
SN: Did Colin Kaepernick really want $20 million to play in the AAF?
CE: We don’t want to comment on the specifics of the conversations, but I will tell you that we think the world of Colin. He’s an exceptional player. Certainly a very strong advocate. But ultimately our league is about being a league of opportunity. Players want to get back to the NFL. They come in. We pay every player the same amount of money. We give every player the same opportunity to get back to the NFL. We’re thrilled when they get back to the NFL. We want to do that. Any player that wants to do that as part of our system, we put all the systems in place to give them the best chance ever to go succeed in the NFL.
