King Kaufman's Sports Daily
College football turns pro: The AAFL hopes to cash in on collegiate passion and fill the gridless days of spring.
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July 2, 2007 | Got a few bucks? Why not start a new pro football league?
The All-American Football League is holding tryouts Monday and Tuesday at the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, Fla. But unlike the United Football League, discussed here last month, and that handful of other upstart pro leagues now confined to history's dustbin, the AAFL, which plans to begin play next spring, claims it's not going to try to compete with the NFL.
"It's very, we think, high-level, triple-A football," says Gene Corrigan, a league board member. Corrigan is the former commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference and the former athletic director at Notre Dame, Virginia and the University of Washington and Lee.
That background is a clue to the AAFL's gimmick. The league aims to be a professional version of college football, with teams playing in college football stadiums, or at least in cities and towns where football is king and spring football is prince. One requirement for players to suit up: They have to have their college degree.
"The board of directors wants it to taste and look and smell and feel and everything that college football is, that's what they want this to be," former University of Florida receiver Travis McGriff told WCJB-TV in Gainesville. McGriff is acting as a league spokesman, though he says he also hopes to play.
"It's a great opportunity for a lot of young people who love the game and want to continue to play it and be able to make a halfway decent living with it," Corrigan says.
He says the league was the brainchild of former NCAA president Cedric Dempsey and his next-door neighbor in La Jolla, Calif., who had season tickets for college football -- at the University of Georgia. The idea Dempsey and his neighbor, entrepreneur Marcus Katz, had was to tap into that kind of passion and fill the void in the lives of those people who spend the winter, spring and summer waiting for the leaves to fall and the penalty flags to fly.
With Katz as the financial backer, Dempsey called his connections and assembled a board of directors made up of former college sports heavyweights.
"Ced Dempsey called us," Corrigan says, "and said, 'You know, I've got this neighbor who I think might be nuts, but I think you guys have got to come out here and at least talk about this.' And we've been talking about it for a couple years now."
The AAFL will use college football rules, Corrigan says, though it hasn't been determined if it'll play on Saturdays when a proposed 10-week schedule begins in April.
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