Alliance of American Football more TV deals including NFL

[single wing]

The AAF has released their media guide. You can see all 84 pages at the below link.


http://sg-dbooks.com/AAF/2019-Media-Guide/

[Mark L. Ford]

Thanks for posting that... two interesting rule twists, from the media guide: "Regular season overtime will give each team one possession starting with first down at the opponent's 10-yard line. If the score remains tied after each team has one possession, it will end in a tie ."

The other is that, to replace the onside kick in the last 5 minutes of the game, the team that has just scored a touchdown "can elect to take the ball on its 28-yard line with a fourth-and-12" in hopes of reaching its 40-yard line and getting first-and-10.

The only team name that makes me wince is the "Birmingham Iron". Meant to sound tough, it conjures up images of a laundry room.

[Reaser]

They've had scrimmages where you could see the teams, players, uniforms and rules in action. Also funny that Spurrier put his starters back in because he wanted to win.

CBSSN has been showing "The Alliance Begins", two episodes/parts this week that has all that stuff about rules and such, which was all already known. Jeff Fisher is in the episodes talking about their replacement for the onside kick and so on.

I watch everything 'football' so I'll watch every game, easy to do. I like some things, others we'll see.

I do find it funny how hard they push the message about "this is football", "quality football" and "real football with no gimmicks" and so on and then when the first game starts it'll be without a kickoff. Irony and conflicting messages in that. "Real football with no gimmicks" then the very first on-field action of the league is skipping the thing that starts every "real football with no gimmicks" game. Plus it's not like they invented not having a kickoff, they're basically playing by Pro Bowl rules -- except of course players will actually/hopefully be tackling eachother during the actual games. So not quite seeing the 'innovation' in that decision.

The last thing on the elimination of a lot of kicking/special teams -including not kicking PAT's- is that they're trying to be a/the developmental league. And how do fringe players make the bottom of an NFL roster after coming from a developmental league? You guessed it. Look at WLAF/NFLE, guys who got their chance from NFLE to NFL via 'teams -- covering kicks, KOR team, return men, KOS's, etc. Not to mention, look at WLAF/NFLE and the amount of kickers that ended up on NFL rosters. Along with developing/reps for QB's it's arguably the #1 role of a NFL's developmental league, special teams/kicking game players. So when you eliminate half the ST's 'plays' you're cutting your players opportunities in half. Seems like an odd decision for a developmental league.

Gimmicks make more sense for a competitor or stand alone entity, such as the XFL. Which in related news, Bob Stoops is out of retirement to coach the Dallas team in the XFL. Interesting.

[74_75_78_79_]

I know it’s too easy to critique this but it IS the no-kickoffs thing that unsells me. Also not a fan at all of strictly-2-pt-conversions. Otherwise, I’d be all-onboard. But who knows? Perhaps I’ll take a peek at a game tomorrow. Looking at each team’s design, I think Arizona’s may be the best. Don’t like the OT rule which is not far from the way it is in college which I don’t like at all. When it comes to OT in general (and I prefer none at all in the regular season), I just recently went from feeling that each team should get at least one possession no matter what all the way back to simple sudden-death.

Just give me a spring league that’s NFL rules, less than half the teams making post-season, and I’m all-in. And if much smaller roster-sizes, thus promoting a lot of players playing both ways (or even three-ways; running on kickoffs/punts as well), all the better!

[JeffreyMiller]

I do like how the AAF will have no kickoffs (and onside kicks) and no extra point kicks. This league will be good for some experiments.

Why not eliminate punts also and make teams go for it on fourth down. They could also rename the game
Footless Ball.

Truth! All this tweaking over the years has led to this. The game is losing it's essence. I enjoyed the recent Super Bowl for the outstanding defensive play. I like kickoffs and prefer the extra point attempt line be moved back to the ten … so what if it's almost automatic. Make it so the opposition can return a block attempt for a score to give them some incentive. Fans these days seem more interested in their fantasy scores that are derived from QBs throwing 50 TDs and 5,000 yards per season, rather than the good old fashioned hard-nosed game that relied on strategy and toughness.

Sorry, just feeling surly today ...

[Reaser]

Fans these days seem more interested in their fantasy scores that are derived from QBs throwing 50 TDs and 5,000 yards per season, rather than the good old fashioned hard-nosed game that relied on strategy and toughness.

Along those lines, the AAF has rules limiting defense, particularly pass rush.

[Reaser]

Watched both games tonight.

The good:

- There's football to watch. And similar to when it's CFL season there's only 4 games a week which means it takes no effort to watch every game.

- As many expected, the league fits Spurrier well and he should at least make Orlando interesting to watch. Bonus, my very distant cousin plays for Orlando.

- Bercovici got frontsided and his helmet flew off.

- Less commercials. Get to listen to the reveiw process. More sound from coaches/players. Basically broadcast things the NFL wouldn't do.

- Same reason I've always liked watching these leagues, get to see players I remember watching play in college.

The bad:

- Obviously was poor quality football. At best you can say 3 teams played poor quality football and one team (Orlando) played semi-competent football.

Which it's the first game of a new league, so it's to be expected. The annoyance will likely be the response. Some will say it sucked and be done with it based off one game without putting it into that context. And worse, others will go the complete opposite direction and try and claim how awesome it was and act like tonight featured the two greatest games in pro football history.

- Similarly, the announcers were trying way too hard to sell how great the games and the players were. Acting like there was 22 first ballot HOFers on the field while also ignoring very poor quality football as they repeatedly proclaimed how good the quality was. Hopefully that was just an opening night sell job and not something that will be a weekly occurance, because it's tough to listen to.

- Both games featured penalties for the AAF's "illegal defense" as well as "illegal formation" on the defense. Ridiculous.


Another observation. The officials uniforms are awful.

[TodMaher]

Any idea where you find stats/gamebooks for the AAF? (Yes, I looked on their website).

[Andrew McKillop]

I was looking for those items this morning and stumbled upon them at this site:
https://noextrapoints.com/boxscores/week-1-sa-sd/

Evidently, however, those are unofficial statistics so that site might not be what you were looking for.

[TodMaher]

There are now two links in a press release on their site, but all I get are blank screens:

https://app.box.com/s/un953nurswwbf40sp6xyp3ydillz1nwj
https://app.box.com/s/74e1hjpwgds01lgqxkn2xcz5l8b2qu5c

UGH!