ArenaBowl XXXIII and a Season Like No Other
Randy Snow
Thursday August 1, 2024
In 2000, I attended my first AFL game in Grand Rapids, Michigan along with my sons, Adam and Aaron. The Grand Rapids Rampage lost to the Tampa Bay Storm that night 74-54. Normally, seeing a team lose by 20 points would turn most people off from wanting to go back and see a team play again, but that was not the case for us. We loved the experience and wanted to see more! It was like nothing we had ever seen before.
In 2001, we became season ticket holders of the Rampage. The team had a new quarterback that year in Clint Dolezel and he made a big impact right away. The team went from having a 6-8 record in 2000 to posting an 11-3 record in 2001, the best record in the league that year. With Dolezel at the helm, the team also won two playoff games against the Chicago Rush and the Indiana Firebirds. This led to the Rampage hosting ArenaBowl XV on August 19, 2001, where they defeated the Nashville Kats 64-42. We were there at that game, and it is still one of the greatest football experiences of my life!
Fast forward to 2024, the AFL returned with an ambitious number of teams, 16! Some had familiar names like the Philadelphia Soul, Georgia Force and Orlando Predators. Others were new to the league like the Washington Wolfpack, Oregon Blackbear and Minnesota Myth. As the season went along, eight of the 16 teams folded, leaving eight teams by the end of the 10-game regular season. Many changes were made in order for the league to continue. The biggest one was Commissioner Lee Hutton III being voted out by the owners who remained and Jeff Fisher, the President of Football Operations for the Nashville Kats, taking over as the interim commissioner. Jerry Kurz, who has a long association with the AFL, also returned to the league in the role of General Counsel and Senior Advisor of Player Operations. Several other people were brought into the front office of the league to help right the ship.
Four AFL playoff games were played and they were all exciting to watch. In the end, the last two teams standing were the #1 Billings Outlaws and the #2 Albany Firebirds.
As if the 2024 season wasn’t bizarre enough, it was then announced that ArenaBowl XXXIII would be played in a shopping mall in New Jersey! Say what?! I had never even heard of the American Dream Mall in East Rutherford, NJ. As it turns out, it is the second largest shopping mall in the country, behind only the Mall of America in Minneapolis.
Media outlets were quick to jump on this news and many ridiculed the league for such an odd decision in an unbelievably tumultuous season. At first, I could not even fathom how this was going to work. But then I saw some artist renderings of what the field would look like when it was played on the ice rink in the mall and it all started to make sense. The more I thought about it, the more I became intrigued by the idea of an AFL game being played in a mall and I decided that I had to be there to witness the game for myself.
On Wednesday, two days before the game, I made the 12-hour drive from Michigan to New Jersey which was made even longer due to construction delays and heavy rain in Pennsylvania. But the excitement of going to the game was ruined even before I left the house that morning when news came out that the game might not even be played. For hundreds of miles, as I drove along the Ohio Turnpike, I wondered if I was wasting my time going to New Jersey until the league put out a statement saying that the game WOULD be played as scheduled.
On Thursday, the day before the game, I went to check out the mall and the field for the ArenaBowl. The mall is actually located right next to MetLife Stadium, where the NFL’s Jets and Giants play. When I found the ice rink, the field had already been installed and it looked awesome! However, the rebound nets were lying on the field still waiting to be installed.
There was also a pre-game press conference at the mall where CBS Broadcaster Ari Wolfe introduced the team owners, head coaches and some of the players from the Firebirds and Outlaws. Afterwords, I got to interview several people about the game and the season for a YouTube video that my son Adam put together after I returned home. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDmxkTRWb6w)
Then, on Friday, it was time to play the game. The nets were up but a bit narrower than usual due to the unique size and dimensions of the second and third viewing levels above the ice rink. But none of that mattered once the game kicked off.
This was just the third ArenaBowl that I have ever attended. The first was in Grand Rapids in 2001, of course, and the other was in Cleveland in 2014 when the Cleveland Gladiators took on the Arizona Rattlers. Those were games. This one was a spectacle!
The location was definitely quirky, but it worked! It looked awesome on TV and it was even better being there in person. In my opinion, it was the perfect ending to the season that was. True fans tuned in to see the game because they love the AFL while others tuned in to see if it was going to be as bad as some in the media were making it out to be. I’m sure those people were pleasantly surprised by the presentation.
People will be talking about this title game for years to come. The nay sayers were proven wrong about this location, just ask anyone who was there how great the experience was. The game itself was also great! A five-point win by Billings that was not decided until the final seconds. Now that’s Arena Football!
It was a great end to a very difficult season, and it gave me a great deal of hope for the future of the league. The AFL has a lot of work to do before the 2025 season, but I believe they now have the right people in place to return the league to its previous status as the premiere indoor football league.
And keep this in mind; with 33 seasons under its belt, the Arena Football League ranks behind only the National Football League and the Canadian Football League in terms of longevity.
