Hennessy on New Rules, NFL Buy-in, the Salary Cap, and the Indiana Firebirds
Matthew Pickut
Saturday February 16, 2002
ArenaFan (that’s me): What were your thoughts coming into this offseason?
Joe Hennessy: Marketing or football?
AF: Both
JH: Our thoughts about what is going on off the field were to continue on our successes, the successes of our first year. We had a late start in the market when we got here in November and really didn’t start to get out there until December. Players arrived three months later, and then before we knew it the season had begun. I think we accomplished a lot in a short time in both ticket sales as well as sponsorship.
We have a tremendous relationship with the Pacers Sports & Entertainment. We’re more than just a tenant in the building -- we have a marketing agreement with them. We wouldn’t have come from Albany without one. The Pacers handle the majority of our sponsorship sales and they handle ticket sales. We have three different people who are specific to Firebirds sales that are our employees, but they officially work for Pacers Sports & Entertainment. That was all a major help to us. If we would have had to come to Indianapolis, open up a phone book and figure out where the hell to go from there, we would have been lost.
AF: What about on the field, with needing to find a way to get past Grand Rapids?
 Jay Jones Image courtesy of Indiana Firebirds |
Greg Hopkins decided to move on to LA it was not a matter of us offering him enough money. He was looking for a change of scenery, I think the idea of Los Angeles excited him, I think Greg wanted to be the guy somewhere and I think he feels he can be that guy in LA. I think he felt like he was playing in the shadow of Eddie Brown here and I think he wanted to have the opportunity to lead a team himself, and I don’t begrudge him for that, we did the best we could negotiating his contract, and he decided to go to Los Angeles.
I think one of the things we thought we needed to do was go out and get ourselves some pass rush help on the defensive line, I think we accomplished that goal with the signing of Hugh Hunter, who I believe is one of the top 4 or 5 rushing defensive lineman in the league. We improved ourselves with the addition and filled some of Greg’s role with the addition of Gary Compton, who was the Ford Toughman of the Year, first team all-arena, all-ironman. We were talking to Gary even while we where negotiating with Greg, so it didn’t take us long to fill that slot with someone who I think is a great player and a great guy, who will fit into our team, which is a team full of good individuals and good people, which is as important to this organization as good athletes.
AF: One of the offseason moves you made was to trade John May to Arizona for future considerations, how exactly do future considerations work in the AFL?
 Gary Compton will don a Firebirds uniform in 2002 Image courtesy of Drew Kennedy |
This time it was specific until a point and after that point it’s not. But John was going to have a hard time making the team at one of our strong positions. We traded up in the dispersal draft to get Josh Heskew from Oklahoma and the university of Nebraska who’s going to be our backup center behind Moore and we felt we where strong enough at that position specifically with guys like Greg Derrick in the background and Mike Gantous in the background and Aaron Johnson who I thought came on strong at the end of last season, so I thought we were certainly solid at that position. I think we needed to upgrade our defensive pressure and I think we did that.
AF: You traded Ingram to LA to move up the dispersal draft right?
JH: To move up and take Rich Young, who from all indications was going to be one of the top FB/LB in the league. The kid is 6’3’’ 285 pounds, runs a 4.5 40, a great special teams player. Rich just signed last week with Jacksonville. I left for an 11:00 meeting, got back at 11:30 and there were 12 messages on the answering machine when I got back. The first one was Rich Young saying he had signed a contract with Jacksonville, and the second one was – can I put you one hold for a second?
AF: Sure.
~Insert light jazz here (actually pretty good stuff)~
AF: Do do de da do do de de da…
JH: Sorry about that Matthew.
AF: No problem.
JH: The second phone call was about Brian McDonald, a kid who played and was a kick returner at Louisville who had a lot of speed which was something we wanted to improve on in the offseason – it was Mike Kelly from the Philadelphia Eagles saying they just signed him to a contract and were allocating him to NFL Europe – I had ten more messages on my machine and I didn’t even bother answering them or even listen to them. I just went down to Starbucks and got a cup of coffee. The positive and negative of finding a great player(s) is that you have a tendency to lose some of them. And one of the things Coach Dailey does as well as or better than anyone in the league is find talent. If you look around the league you’ll find teams with a lot of former Firebirds and that includes coaches and players. It’s one of these things that I call up [Coach Dailey] and say ‘we lost another’ and we moan for a while and then we know we’re doing the right thing because we’re signing good players.
AF: Speaking of losing coaches, how is the search for a new offensive Coordinator going?
JH: I don’t think there is a search really, at this point, I think Brian Partlow, who was our QB coach last year, is going to move up to be the offensive coordinator. Brian’s been with the organization a couple of years. Coach Dailey feels confident in him – that he can take that role and he knows every aspect of our offense. There is going to be a certain learning curve, both from the teaching end and the play calling end, but Coach Dailey will also be involved with that aspect of being offensive coordinator. He’s done that before.
Certainly loosing an Ed Hodgkiss is a tough loss because I think Ed is one of the brightest minds in Arena Football and was a great coach for us for a number of seasons, but you can go back and look at the history of the team in 1994 we had Mike Dailey, Mike Hohensee [Chicago Head Coach], Darren Arbett [San Jose Head Coach], Steve Thonn [Former Houston Head Coach], and Doug Kay [Former Carolina Head Coach], as our coaching staff and all those guy went on to do some tremendous things in the Arena Football League, so we’re not hesitant or shy about grooming coaches and we think that Brian is going to step up and do a very good job. We wish Ed luck in LA.
AF: According to your bio in the media guide you worked for the CBA Patroons in Albany, what is a Patroon?
JH: The Patroons were in the CBA when it was thriving and they were head coached by Phil Jackson who I just spent time with when he was here in Indianapolis. They were also coached by George Carl and Bill Mussleman.
AF: That’s a pretty good coaching staff right there.
JH: We had some of the best teams in CBA history. We had a team that had Mario Ellie and Vince Askew, Albert King, and some other great former NBA stars. The Patroons, the word Patroon comes from the word for a Dutch Landowner in the Capital District in Albany.
AF: I didn’t know that.
JH: We had one team that was 48-6 and another team that was 46-8. Phil Jackson won a championship in Albany. One of the years I did play-by-play and the other year I actually ran the team. I was the General Manager when George Karl was coach and that was the team with Mario Ellie and Vincent Askew, Albert King, and Ben McDonald. That was a great great basketball team that got decimated as we went to the play-offs because of the NBA 10-day contracts.
AF: Sounds familiar.
JH: Yeah.
AF: You used to be on the League Rules and Competition committee, what kind of rule changes have been considered, or come out of that committee.
JH: A few years ago we made sure that the sideboards were in play. One of the unique aspects of the Arena game is the sideboards. An offensive player can push off those boards and stay in play as long as he doesn’t go out of bounds. There is a sideline that is eight inches in from that sideboard. A lot of fans don’t know that, they think they [the boards] are out of bounds, but they’re not.
We made sure that those boards are in bounds so you could push off of that board. If you’re pushed into that board, you are out of bounds; a pass that you catch off those boards is complete.
We’ve always gone back and forth every year with the extra point question, about rushing on extra points. Because of the nature of this beast, if you allow an outside rush you’ll need to hire a kicker every single week. So every once and a while you look at the extra point on the field and it looks a little ugly and we always try and find ways to fix that problem.
This year we’re working for the preseason to allow a kick returner to be able, because of our soft net – a lot of times the ball will get caught in that soft net and the kick returner will reach back for that ball and not be able to get to it because his foot is out of bounds – that back line will be in play with one foot so a player can catch that ball off that soft net and be able to return the ball. It’s the only spot where the back line will actually be in-play as opposed to out of play.
We’ve always looked as substitutions, at times someone will bring up a suggestion that we go to freer substitutions and we’ve always avoided that because it would alter the game dramatically, there are also other things that the committee will review every couple of years. I haven’t been on the committee for a few years but I know that the one rule last year that we put in where you could kick an extra point and if it came back you could run it in for the points – that rule is out this year. So we look at a lot of things to make the game better and more exciting if we can because it is a fan game and we thought that this year the addition of being able to return that ball would be more positive.
AF: This is just something that I was thinking of after watching Keith Traylor run 67-yards with the ball in Chicago… people love fat guys running with the ball. Is there any way you could make a rule encouraging that? [I mean ‘fat’ with all respect, because the only time I can be considered small is when I’m compared to certain (but not all) members of our solar system or Gilbert Brown].
JH: [Laughs] You mean some design to get more fat guys running with the football? It’s cool when it happens, but that’s because it happens so rarely, if you back to the Refrigerator – the Bears, when he was a fullback, that was unique because he was one of the only ones to do that. You never want to initiate a rule change that will actually slow down your game.
AF: Fat guys running would certainly do that.
JH: I mean if you make a rule that once a quarter a fat guy has to carry the ball on a kick-off, all though it would be humorous, it certainly wouldn’t be professional or positive for the game.
AF: Well it was just a thought.
JH: Well I appreciate your thought, I’ll bring it up to the rules committee. We’ll see.
AF: As we come up on the deadline for the NFL buy-in what are thoughts about how the process is coming along?
JH: From what I’ve seen it’s all positive, I don’t know the specifics about what the NFL has in mind, but all I hear every day is that its positive. They have until March 31st to exercise and I hear more positive than negative. If and when it happens it will certainly be a positive thing for the league and a shot in the arm and will open up for more NFL owners to buy teams in the league. Obviously the strength of the league is based on the strength of the ownership. And I think that the more NFL owners that we have in here, the stronger the chance for success we have.
AF: You mentioned the salary cap earlier how much has the salary changed your job?
JH: It’s changed it dramatically. It goes up 6% each year for the next six years of the deal if the deal remains in place. So you have to now look at your team in terms of long term propositions. Guys that now are in the option year of their contract so to speak, who are going to be free agents next year. We have to evaluate their talent and decide if we want to offer them a long term contract so they won’t become free agents. Then they are looking for more money because they aren’t going to become free agents, and we have to look at what we are offering them for second and third years, and evaluate that in the salary cap.
The salary cap is not a hard cap, which means it’s not just related to player salaries, but to any kind of player compensation, which includes Workers Compensation, player housing, 401k, health insurance, and as some of those expenses fluctuate. Specifically Workers Comp will be interesting to see what happens over the next few years because invariably Workers Comp goes up after you’ve been in the pool in that state for a couple of years. That goes against the cap so you have to try and figure out what your Workers Comp is going to be in a couple years with formulas.
You have to figure out the cost of doing business, housing and what all that stuff will be and you’ve got to stay inside that cap. If you come to camp and you’re over it, you have to cut guys. So you do the best you can. We don’t have any capologists so to speak, John Colner who is the assistant general manager and I sit down and evaluate these guys and try to figure out where we think we are and do the best we can. Some teams do have people who are specific to that role, but we have a clear understanding of the cap, and we try to look not only at this year, but try and make sure we’re competitive every year.
AF: The collective bargaining agreement has another six years, what’s the labor relation situation like?
JH: Well we’ve been working under the Guidry Settlement, which is the deal that was put into place. There may be a new collective bargaining down the road before the six years is over. I would say like anything the players that are happy with the deal are the free agents who have made a lot of money. There are probably some players who are not very happy with the deal because they are on the lower end of the spectrum.
It’s just like anything else now, you have to pay the guys who command the money, who are free agents from your team or others, or they will become free agents. While the guys who are rookies or second or third year guys a lot of those guys are going to see minimum salaries because you paid the other guys what you had to pay to keep them or get them. So there will be a disparity between the big money guys and the lower level guys, but that’s the nature of the game. So there are some guys who are very happy with it, and some guys who I can tell you are not very happy with it. I can tell you that everybody has gotten a pay raise. So everyone should be somewhat happy.
AF: I appreciate your time, is there anything you want the fans to know?
JH: Well, we think we’ve improved our football team, Coach Dailey has done a tremendous job in the offseason. We think we’ve filled the holes that we had, we picked up in the dispersal draft Kevin Huntley who played with Milwaukee, so at this point Gary Compton and Kevin Huntly will fill the roles that Hopkins and Sacco did last year. So even though we lost a player we replaced him with an equal or more talent.
We’ve gone out and improved our pass rush. We’ve got some other free agents we’re looking at bringing into camp. I’m still negotiating with some guys that have been on the team with us in the past. Some who have had NFL experience, we’re looking at getting those done in a few weeks.
AF: Would any of those be a Mr. John Krick?
JH: We’ve been in contact with him on and off, he and his agent, at this point the ball is in their court, so to speak. John hasn’t played a lot of games for us in the last few years but there is a salary cap and we need to make sure we stay in the confines of that. And we need to make sure John is healthy, we hear he is and certainly John would be a positive addition to our football club and he’s one of the guys we’re looking at.
We wanted to improve our team and our thoughts in the off season were to be competitive and specifically with Grand Rapids in our division. I think we’ve done that. And I think we’ve got an excellent chance to go to the Arena Bowl, and get a championship, we’re doing a good job with season ticket sales, and I hope that we put even more people in the seats this year and I hope that Indianapolis and the state of Indiana enjoyed Arena Football in their first year and we continue to be professional and give them a great product.
AF: Thanks for your time, and good luck this season.
JH: No problem.
Matthew Pickut is a pastor in northern Indiana and a long time AFL fan. He also writes for his own website: The Brown Paper Blog. He graduated from Taylor University in Upland Indiana (class of `96) with degrees in Biblical Literature and Sociology as well as a healthy respect for the medicinal properties of coffee.
