Promoters of a new professional football league are gambling that being the only game in town will make the Utah Pioneers team successful in Salt Lake City.
They're also banking that college football fans in this area will pay upwards of $15 to see former stars from BYU (tight end Chris Smith has already agreed to play), Utah, Utah State and other in-state schools play.Officials of the Professional Spring Football League disclosed more details of their proposed league via telephone press conference Tuesday from New York City. It had been announced that they would reveal who had been chosen to own the local team, but by Tuesday they were still negotiating with a couple prospective owners, said league founder and president Vince Sette, who describes himself as having a background in computers and having graduated from "the streets of New York." The franchise fee, by the way, is $250,000.
Only two of the league's 10 teams - Miami and Tampa Bay - have owners now, and for that matter, only nine of the 10 teams have cities to play in, Sette said. So far, teams are definitely planned for Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Portland and Little Rock, Ark., in the Western Division, and Boston, Columbia, S.C., and the two Florida teams in the Eastern Division. A fifth team, in Chicago, fell through when the only available stadium, at Northwestern University, was found to be off-limits to pro teams, but Sette is confident a site for the fifth team can be found in another city.
As conceived now, each team will play a 16-game season, followed by playoffs and the Red, White & Blue Bowl, to be held around July 4.
Sette and the other league organizers figure each team will need to average just 20,000 fans per game to make this endeavor work. And they're not counting on television revenue to bail them out.
And despite the failure of such recent undertakings as the United States Football League, they are confident that they have the right sport, conducted the right way, to succeed.
"Most Americans want to see the professional sport," said Rex Lardner, PSFL commissioner and chief executive officer. A former marketing and public relations person with CBS and Turner Broadcasting, Lardner added, "I'd like to think we're the only game in town. That could be an important factor."
The organizers also seemed aware that the Salt Lake team might have to adapt to local peculiarities to thrive. For instance, Lardner said they were aware that Sunday games might not go over big with the LDS market, so games here may be held on Fridays or Saturdays.
Sette said the plan is to hold games in the University of Utah's Rice Stadium, though all the details haven't been worked out yet.
As for athletes, the league will hold three tryout camps - at Atlanta in October, and December and January at sites to be announced - from which it expects to create a pool of 750-1,000 prospective players. Current college players will also be drafted to make up the 45-man teams, probably in late January.
That draft, incidentally, will not be conducted like the NFL draft, Sette said. To avoid the signing problems that occur in the NFL, where the No. 7 pick of the first round waits to see how much money the No. 8 pick gets before agreeing to a contract, and the No. 6 pick waits for the No. 7 pick, etc., the PSFL draft will be conducted behind closed doors. When it's all over, the names of players drafted will be announced in alphabetical order, rather than by round.
And that isn't expected to be the only way this league differs from the NFL. Sette said some rule changes are also in the works, such as requiring that a touchdown be scored to win overtime games; a limit on use of instant replays; and the restoration of the two-point conversion.
Probably the biggest difference, however, will be in salaries. Sette said teams will have a maximum $2 million budget for player salaries, so the average player will make about $45,000. He also said the league has plans to discourage team-jumping (i.e., free agency), by not allowing teams to get in bidding wars for players' services. They didn't offer many details on this part of the play, but it sounds like the kind of thing that would make an antitrust lawyer lick his chops.
However they work it out, though, Sette said they are making a five-year commitment to the league. "We expect to take three or four years to create a following," he said. "If in five years nobody is coming out to the ballpark, we might just decide to quit."
So far, Sette said, the league has been received very well. "We have a whole unique kind of structure and concept," he said. "Once people hear it isn't another run-of-the-mill football league, their skepticism changes to confidence. Instead of saying, `Oh, no, another football league,' they have been very supportive."