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Arena football all but finished for 2009
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Based on a conversation I had yesterday with Michael Young, the executive vice president of the Colorado Crush, it's a safe bet that the Arena Football League will be dark in 2009. While the senior executive didn't quite come out and say that directly, he strongly hinted at that reality.
"The best thing might be to take three to four months to get it right," Young said during an interview Tuesday on Mile High Sports Radio. "We need to fix the financial model and better organize the league office."
That second step seems to be the key to saving the AFL. Young suggested that the league took its collective eye off the ball, letting the day-to-day operations fall through the cracks as they pursued grandiose initiatives. When some of those plans didn't come to fruition, the Arena Football League found itself in a mess.
"We hoped that a venture capital firm would come in and save the day," Young said when asked to cite the league's biggest error in judgement. "We should have stepped in and overrode the league."
Now, that appears to be exactly what the AFL's franchise owners are doing. Locally, the Crush are owned by a trio of big-time businessmen -- Pat Bowlen, John Elway and Stan Kroenke. Young suggested that the league will spend 2009 tapping into the expertise of its franchise owners, including the Colorado contingent, to forge a better business model for the future.
When asked if that meant the league would be dark for the 2009 season in hopes of returning in a reorganized manner in 2010, Young responded honestly. "That's probably where we're going."
Some AFL fans have voiced frustration that the league's list of millionaire and billionaire owners simply haven't agreed to pony up the cash needed to keep the league afloat. According to Young, that plan would simply being an act of chasing good money after bad. Until the league fixes its internal problems, its current dire situation was an inevitable reality that wasn't going away any time soon.
"Decisions were made as Band-Aids," Young concluded. "They stopped the bleeding but never fixed the wound."
As painful as it may be for Arena Football League fans to hear, not playing in 2009 may be the only way to save the 21-year-old sports entity.
