Indoor Football provides a laugh

An AIFA team in Wasilla, Alaska, offered this explanation why it is postponing its game ...

"Due to the beautiful weather on a holiday weekend & after receiving hundreds of phone calls & emails from our fans & sponsors, the league has given us permission to reschedule our game to a date that the majority of our fans can attend rather than only a handful.All May 29th tickets will be honored on June 5th which will be our food pantry drive & Special Olympics night."

The real reason

http://trib.com/sports/pro/article_af7fa611-b024-5d47-96dc-e973257af47a.html

Sometimes they just write themselves ...

 

Our local indoor football league is a joke as well. Last year a team was suspended because the owner was trying to shake-down the league for cash. Another team suspended operations halfway through the season because they couldn't afford to pay players anymore.

And still they constantly complain that we don't take them seriously.

 

you only cover us when we run out of money

 

Still funny.

 

Too bad there isn't a local celebrity in Wasilla that can buy the team and ensure its Wyoming opponents can make the trip.

Too bad Wasilla and Fayetteville won't reach the title game. According to Google Maps, it's a 91-hour drive, though you know how conservative they are about drive times, so it's probably not THAT bad.

And the AIFA either sounds like an insurance agency or a Samoan wrestler.

 

once upon a time i thought indoor football had a chance, but it does such a good job of destroying itself....

 

And the Ogden team can't play any more home games because the arena and the team are in a dispute? Awesome. Wonder where they're practicing?

This indoor football stuff isn't as bad the time the Central Hockey League tried to kick out the Topeka and Texarkana franchises during the season. No matter the official explanation, it came down to Texarkana beeding cash and the commissioner being pissed at Topeka's owner. Topeka got an injunction to finish out the season but the team switched to juniors the following season.

 

Yet newspapers will still cover these "pro" teams.

 

If people go to the games, why wouldn't they?

 

When the Wichita Warlords existed, in the first incarnation of the "Indoor Football League," we went to the team's first-ever game.

They ran promotional games between every score and you know how often they score in indoor football. Kickoff was at 7 p.m. The fourth quarter began at 10:30. We left at 10:45. There were still 9 1/2 minutes to go.

They gave one of the sponsors a wireless mike and he went nuts with it. The most annoying thing was a tendency to go "WHOOOOOO!" One section tried to get a "Please stop!" chant going on him. Our section got "YOU SUCK!" going and we had four or five sections going at it.

The astroturf was a piece of old turf from some college. You could tell in the end zones where they just painted over whatever logo had been there before. We couldn't tell whose logo it was.

Well, my friend who was with us worked at a Wichita radio station. Monday afternoon on his show, he called the team's general manager. He told him fans hated the sponsor with the mike and the games that drew out the length. The GM admitted on the air that both of these things were mistakes and that the sponsor had his mike privileges taken away and the games would only be after Wichita scores.

The whole league went belly-up at the end of the season. Wichita was considered a good enough market to get an af2 team the next year despite how horrible the Warlords were.

 

That sounds a LOT like our indoor football team. They have a local radio personality doing the PA from the floor, on the sidelines. He screams during plays, talks over music, celebrates with players after scores and interviews fans during the game.

The first game we covered (sent a stringer), it started at 7:05 p.m. and ended at a quarter to midnight. They did so many in-game promotions and dance team performances that it drug the already slow game on forever.

Sent the stringer to the second game and when he got there he was told that they "sold" the media row tickets to fans and that he'd have to find an empty seat in the arena. When he went down for postgame stats, they told him they would e-mail him the stats in the morning (the next day).

Needless to say, we didn't cover their third game and won't cover their fourth one either.

 

I'm sure the 100 people who care are already at the game. Sort of like a newspaper covering an ABA team. You give credibility to a joke league instead of devoting your resources on a real sport.