



New professional football league

Posted by Doug on July 27, 2006

This isn't typically a news blog, but this story is of great interest, and I'm a little surprised that I hadn't heard anything about it before. A group of former university presidents, chancellors, and athletic directors are forming a new spring football league.

Their main schtick is that they will play in (unspecified for now) college stadiums, and that the teams will have some sort of territorial rights to the players from that college and nearby colleges. Did the USFL have a similar element to it, or am I making that up?

The season will run from April to June (starting in 2007), the players will be "owned" by the league rather than the individual teams, and they will make about $100,000 per year. Not too shabby. Now here is the weird part:

All 44-48 players per team must have graduated from college and exhausted their college eligibility.

I understand the college eligibility part --- they don't want to step on the NCAA's or the NFL's toes --- but why require graduation? They say it's "an incentive for current college players to graduate," but I just don't see that working out. Let's see, I'm a marginal NFL prospect who will probably get drafted on the second day. Oh by the way, I hate school because I never had any business being there in the first place. I'd have to take a heavy load in my last semester to graduate. Here are my choices:

A. quit school, work full-time with a speed coach, and try to shave .08 off my forty time before the combine.

B. get serious about academics so that I'll be eligible to play in the minor leagues.

If this blog is like every other spot on the internet, I must have dozens of lawyers reading this. Is it even legal to require a college degree for a job in which it is clearly not necessary?

Aside from that nonsense, I'm all for it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 5:12 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.