Leaders in sports, academia and business are orchestrating a plan to establish a new professional football league that would mandate that all its players be college graduates.
The All American Football League, a for-profit company led by former NCAA president Cedric Dempsey, is slated to begin its inaugural season in April. The eight-team league would play at Division I-A football stadiums in the Southeastern Conference, the Big Ten and the Atlantic Coast Conference, bringing revenue to colleges through stadium lease agreements.
Officials at the University of Florida, the University of Tennessee, North Carolina State University and Purdue University said they have already hashed out agreements to lease their stadiums if the league comes to fruition next spring.
But without college degrees, players will be barred from playing in the AAFL. "We believe the League will encourage college players to stay in school and graduate even after their eligibility has expired," Dempsey said in a July 26 news release.
Damani Leech, director of football and baseball at the NCAA, said it would be difficult to speculate what the AAFL's impact on Division I football graduation rates might be. Only 65 percent of Division I football players currently graduate, according to the NCAA's most recent data.
"(Its impact) is going to take into account a lot of different factors, including how successful the league is and what type of motivations it creates for student-athletes who want to participate," he told The Herald.
Director of Athletics Michael Goldberger wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that approximately 95 percent of Brown's student-athletes graduate, indicating that the AAFL's graduation stipulation would have little effect on Brown football players who want to play in the AAFL.
Goldberger thinks other factors will outweigh the league's graduation policy. "In general I like the idea, but I have real concerns about the ability of the league to succeed," he wrote. "I think that fans are far more interested in the quality of play rather than the fact that the players are all college graduates."
"If the league becomes successful, then surely the requirement for a college degree would eventually have an impact on the graduation rate for NCAA Division I football players," he wrote.
One step the AAFL board of directors has taken to help attract talent and ensure an entertaining game is a proposed $100,000 average player salary.
AAFL Operations Manager Kris Kem said the league's salary would play a significant role in luring talented players with college degrees away from other professional leagues. "As soon as we announced the league on July 27, we received several inquiries from players who have played recently in the (Canadian Football League), the Arena League and some from NFL Europe," he said.
The Arena League offers an average player salary of approximately $30,000, while the average CFL salary is about $40,000.
"There are so many players that are NFL-caliber who are just on the cusp of making a team or making a name for themselves," Kem said. "We just want to give them an opportunity to play the game they love."
Nick Hartigan '06, last year's Ivy League player of the year who narrowly missed out on an NFL contract, agreed. "There are more than enough guys out there that can play ball," he said. "The issue is whether or not people are going to watch the product."
Hartigan, who led Brown to a 2006 Ivy League championship, was cut by the New York Jets in August after inking a free agent contract in June. Despite "missing the team atmosphere," Hartigan said he isn't considering a stab at the AAFL because he's currently studying at Harvard Law School. Still, he said the $100,000 salary is very appealing feature of the league.
But to guarantee that spending won't soar too far above the $100,000 mark, the AAFL has decided to pay players' salaries, instead of allowing individual teams to pay their players. "The basis for the (league-controlled) salaries is that we are striving for this to be a team game, and we don't want to see too many egos on the field," Kem said, noting that the league would also control free agency and trades.
Besides the graduation policy and the league-controlled transactions, Kem pointed out other nuances that would make the AAFL different: The season would last 12 weeks in contrast to the NFL's 16-week season, and tickets to games would cost just $30.
"We are a spring league, and that's what we will stay. And we are not going to be a gimmick league like the XFL," he said, referring to a now-defunct professional football league that tried to curry the favor of fans by using unconventional rules. "We are not going to be kicking four-point field goals or, instead of using a coin flip (to start the game), have guys chase after a football. It's going to be a quality game with quality coaches."
And unlike the XFL, Kem added the AAFL has no plans to compete with the NFL. The AAFL, he said, simply aims to fill a void.
"There is no place - aside from the NFL - for football players to play the American game of football. There's the Canadian league, which has its own set of rules, and there's the Arena league, which is played indoors on a 50-yard field," he said. "We're not trying to change the landscape of football; we're just trying to create a league where there seems to be a void."
