Re-thinking the af2 Post-season
Michael Vergane
Wednesday June 13, 2001
It gives the local football fan a sense of community. Rooting for the hometown team in your local arena is different from driving two hours to see your favorite NFL team with 60,000 strangers.
The af2 also serves the purpose of giving the local football fan something to watch until fall arrives. For me that is college football.
Don’t get me wrong. I watch the NFL, but Sundays always take a backseat to Saturdays come September. There is nothing like the atmosphere of a small town on a Saturday gameday. Whether it be Columbia, Missouri or Chapel Hill, North Carolina, each town has its own traditions that set it apart from the other.
So why do I wax poetic about college football on an Arena football website?
That is because if Arkansas Twister President and CEO Dave Berryman have anything to say about it, the af2 will borrow from one of college football’s greatest traditions.
There is, of course, no way the af2 can replicate the air of a crisp autumn day. But they can utilize elements from the college game that can help them solve a problem which will face them beginning as early as next year. And that is how to decide a league champion.
The af2 is growing fast. Fifteen teams in 2000. Thirteen teams were added this year and 12 to 14 teams to be added in 2002. What was once a league based mainly east of the Mississippi River will stretch from coast to coast next year.
But with growth comes growing pains. For example, how do you fairly and economically crown a champion?
Remember, this isn’t the NFL. Heck, this isn’t even the AFL. Teams on the east coast cannot jet out to the west coast for a regular season game in May just for the sake of having a balanced schedule. Travel costs have to be contained. League officials want the af2 to be a ‘regional bus league’. That is why you are seeing less interconference games this season.
So what happens next year when a west coast division is thrown into the mix? And how do you create a fair and balanced post-season when there is an isolation between divisions and little comparison for playoff seeding? As a member of the expansion committee, Dave Berryman brought up these points at the owners meetings in Chicago last month and presented to the league an interesting proposal, to say the least.
“We have to clearly define the league’s objective”, said Berryman. “Is our objective to have one champion for all of arenafootball2, or do we have more champions and have even more teams qualify for the playoffs? That is when I came up with the idea of doing what they do in Division I football.”
Here is what Berryman is proposing. The regular season will be expanded to 18 games. This will give every team 9 home games – an opportunity for extra revenue with an additional home game.
The post-season will last only two weeks to make the entire season a total of 20 weeks – only one week longer than currently.
Rather than playoffs games, the af2 championship game opponents will be determined by an official league poll conducted weekly by coaches, media and possibly a mathematically formulated poll.
The #1 and #2 teams on the last regular season poll will play each other in the Arena Cup two weeks after the final week of the season. The week prior to that will consist solely of ‘af2 bowl games’.
“I think it would create a lot of fan interest”, said Berryman about the weekly poll rankings. “It would be a source of controversy. During the fall, what is the one thing you see on the sportscasts and newspapers on Mondays? The Top 25 and who is #1 in college football.”
“I think it could draw a lot of attention from the newspaper, radio and TV stations in all of the af2 markets and get people talking football all week long. And I think it would create a lot of fan communication on the websites. This could be a great promotional vehicle for the league.”
As for the bowl games that would be played the week after the regular season, Berryman envisions games that would make money for the teams and their communities rather than lose money as the league witnessed last year.
Berryman sees as many as 9 regionalized bowl games. Along with the Arena Cup, this would give 20 teams the opportunity to compete in the post-season.
Much like college football, these bowl games would have a corporate title sponsor and pre-determined participants.
For example, the ****** Bowl at the Bi-Lo Center in Greenville, South Carolina would have the #2 Northeast Division vs. the #3 Southeast Division teams. Each team would get a winner and loser’s guarantee. Berryman also sees the marketing advantage of having the host city’s Chamber Of Commerce getting involved and making a three-day festival around the bowl game.
“What this proposal would do is give more teams the opportunity to make revenue by playing in more games”, said Berryman.
Under this year’s system, all teams have 8 regular season home games to draw revenue from. An additional 4 teams will host a quarterfinal playoff game and two teams will host an additional semi-final game.
Under Berryman’s plan, all teams will host 9 regular season game home games. In addition to that, as many as 18 teams will play in a bowl game with a guaranteed payout. And by tying in a corporate title sponsor, Berryman believes these bowl games can be a financial success.
The same cannot be said about last year’s playoff games. In the quarterfinal round, Norfolk drew only 2,957 for their game against Jacksonville. Augusta had 2,523 for their contest against Carolina. Even the Quad City Steamwheelers drew a franchise low of 5,004 for their quarterfinal game against Pensacola. To say these games made money that weekend would be a stretch.
As the af2 continues to grow, it will grow increasingly difficult to work a viable playoff system into a league schedule and still finish the season at a reasonable date. With a 28 team league, many owners feel that an eight-team playoff is not enough. How many teams will they feel is sufficient when the league grows to 70 teams? And how many weeks will it take?
At this point in the af2’s infancy, I believe it is more important to give all of the franchises the opportunity to generate revenue rather than to give all of the teams the opportunity to play in the playoffs. Dave Berryman’s plan gives them that chance.
His proposal will have a polarizing effect on the af2 community. There is generally no gray area when it comes to discussing bowl games and polls. But cutting away all of the emotion and looking at it strictly as a business opportunity, this makes sense for the league right now.
And who knows, it might even give us fans something to complain about until the college polls come out.
Michael Vergane was a writer for ArenaFan Online from 2000 to 2002.
