Trent Richardson of the Birmingham Iron leads the AAF in rushing touchdowns. (Photo by Logan Riely/Getty Images)
The Alliance of American Football, age 52 days, suddenly suspended operations on Tuesday, according to multiple reports. The exact cause of the stoppage was not announced, although there had been some prior financial issues and an ongoing disagreement with the NFLPA about whether NFL practice squad players would be able to participate.
The inaugural AAF season lasted for eight weeks of games and was 25 days shy of its first championship game, to be played in Frisco, Texas, and be televised by CBS. Principal investor and board chairman Tom Dundon made the decision to cease operations “against the wishes of league co-founders Charlie Ebersol and Bill Polian,” according to the Action Network’s Darren Rovell. Dundon had pledged upwards of $250 million to the league and is said to be losing $70 million of that sum.
“I am extremely disappointed to learn Tom Dundon has decided to suspend all football operations of the Alliance of American Football,” Polian said in a statement Tuesday, according to ESPN. “When Mr. Dundon took over, it was the belief of my co-founder, Charlie Ebersol, and myself that we would finish the season, pay our creditors, and make the necessary adjustments to move forward in a manner that made economic sense for all.” (Ebersol did not immediately respond to a request from SportTechie for comment.)
Whether the league will fold altogether or resume play at some point is unclear. If this is the league’s demise, the AAF would be survived chiefly by its technology platform and gaming app. Mourners gathered on social media platforms. No memorial service is expected, but a formal announcement will be made at 5 p.m. ET.
The Alliance was born as a twofold proposition. As Ebersol said, “One of the things we’re building is a football league, but on the other side, we’re building a technology company that allows direct and, for the first time ever, fully real-time data streaming out of the game for what we call Stats 2.0.”
In launching the AAF, Pro Football Hall of Fame executive Polian was charged with creating a viable spring football league and had recruited big name coaches like Steve Spurrier and Mike Singletary, as well as some recognizable players like Trent Richardson and Johnny Manziel. How many players sufficiently distinguished themselves to warrant NFL contracts is unclear.
The technology platform, however, will be bequeathed to other sports. Ebersol touted the on-field wearables that could transmit data to a gaming platform for instant odds making. MGM Resorts invested in the league, and its president of interactive games, Scott Butera, hailed the platform as “very different” than what currently exists on the market.
The gaming app tracked the personnel on the field, the down-and-distance situation, and the offensive and defensive formations. With that information, the platform immediately assigned percentage likelihoods to several play-calling scenarios, allowing users to predict a run or pass, the direction of the play, and whether it would result in a first down or touchdown.
“We really were in it for the technology,” Butera said. “They have a technology that’s eliminated latency. If you actually watch the game in the app, you see the play before it happens on TV.”
One MMQB source espoused the theory that the gaming app was the primary lure for Dundon’s midseason investment, saying, “Dundon got the technology he wanted and he’s now minus one rather large headache.” Rovell reported, however, that shuttering the league in order to take its tech IP would not be legal.
In-play betting is widely seen as a great new frontier for revenue and fan engagement in the sports industry. The technology underpinning the AAF app is expected to be applied for that purpose.
Tracking data in other sports is often relegated to postmortem reviews rather than concurrent analysis. Ebersol noted that the NFL’s Next Gen Stats, for instance, were often presented in broadcasts several plays after key moments.
“Where you need to solve the latency issue is that, right now, all of the data capture is so slow that they can’t put it in the broadcast, so it’s all after the fact,” Ebersol said last September at the inaugural SportTechie NEXT conference. “Six plays later, they’re like, ‘Now we’re going to show you how cool these statistics are.’ ‘Great, I made the bet six plays ago, so that’s not really effective.’”
Furthermore, Ebersol noted the importance of explaining the meaning of advanced data in a way that didn’t confuse fans.
“This is what we spent a great deal of time and money on is looking at all of the predictive statistics based on telemetry, velocity, biometrics, etc., and then masking that from the end user so they’re getting an actionable piece of information that they understand,” he added.
