Arena football
Arena football is a variety of eight-man indoor gridiron football. The game is played indoors on a smaller field than American or Canadian football, designed to fit in the same surface area as a standard North American ice hockey rink, resulting in a faster and higher-scoring game that can be played on the floors of indoor arenas. The sport was invented in 1981, and patented in 1987, by Jim Foster, a former executive of the National Football League and the United States Football League. The name is trademarked by Gridiron Enterprises and had a proprietary format until its patent expired in 2007.
Nicknames
Three leagues have played under official arena football rules: the Arena Football League, which played 32 seasons in two separate runs from 1987 to 2008 and 2010 to 2019 and is planned to return for a third time in 2024; arenafootball2, the AFL's erstwhile developmental league, which played 10 seasons from 2000 through 2009; and the China Arena Football League, which began play in 2016 but was not directly affiliated with the now-defunct AFL. The CAFL, which operated on a heavily abbreviated schedule solely in China, was the most recent league in the world playing by arena rules.
Through the late 1990s, the Arena Football League was the only league playing any variant of the sport designed for indoor play. A clarification limiting the scope of its patent allowed for competing indoor football leagues to use the same size field and most other aspects of the game. Arena football is distinguished from the other indoor leagues by its use of large rebound nets attached to the side of each goalpost, which keep any missed field goal or overthrown ball in the field of play and allow the ball to remain live; the rebound nets were the only part of the patent that was upheld until it expired. As a result, some non-AFL indoor leagues that formed after the patent expired like the National Arena League have used rebound nets, while other leagues such as the Indoor Football League and American Indoor Football opt to not use them.
History[edit]
Early history[edit]
The first demonstration of football on a small field was actually played outdoors at the original open-air Madison Square Garden.[1] Using nine-man sides, Pennsylvania defeated Rutgers 10–0 at the annual meeting of the Amateur Athletic Union on January 16, 1889.[2]
The first documented indoor football game was an exhibition between the Springfield YMCA Training School and a Yale Senior Class team played on December 12, 1890, at Madison Square Garden II.[3] James Naismith scored a touchdown for Springfield, though Yale won the exhibition 16–10.[3] The following day a second exhibition game was played, with Pennsylvania defeating Rutgers 20–12.[4] The field at Madison Square Garden measured 260 feet (79 m) long and 100 feet (30 m) wide.[4]
The first documented indoor regulation football games were those played at the Chicago Coliseum in the late 1890s. The first such game matched Michigan against Chicago on Thanksgiving Day 1896. The match was "the first collegiate game of football played under a roof."[5][6] Adding to the novelty, as daylight turned to darkness, the field inside the Coliseum was lit with electric lighting.[7] With seven acres of floor space, the sprawling Coliseum is believed to have not needed any compromises to accommodate an American football field. According to a newspaper account, the field grew dark in the second half, and play was halted for ten minutes to discuss whether play should continue. Play was resumed, and the lights were finally turned on after Michigan scored a touchdown.[5] The press proclaimed the experiment in indoor football to be a success:
Arena Football League rules[edit]
The field[edit]
As its name implies, arena football is played exclusively indoors, in arenas usually designed for either basketball or ice hockey teams. The field is the same width 85 feet (26 m) and length 200 feet (61 m) as a standard NHL hockey rink, making it approximately 30% of the dimensions of a regular American gridiron football field, and 19% of a Canadian gridiron football field (the total playing area, including the end zones of an Arena football field is 17,000 square feet (1,600 m2)). The scrimmage area is 50 yards (46 m) long (unlike the field in NFL which is 100 yards (91 m) long), and each end zone is approximately 8 yards deep, two yards less than the standard 10 yards. Depending on the venue in which a game is being played, the end zones may be rectangular (like a basketball court) or, where necessary because of the building design, rounded (like a hockey rink; this is much like some Canadian football fields where the end zones can be cut off by a track). Each sideline has a heavily padded barrier, with the padding placed over the hockey dasher boards.
Compensation[edit]
All current indoor football teams play at a minor league or semi-professional level. The average player's salary in the Arena Football League was US$1,800 per game in 2008; this is about one-quarter of the Canadian Football League (adjusted for inflation). Players in af2 were paid $250 per game and the AIFA and IFL had per-game salaries of $200 per game; the AFL paid $885 per game for most players in 2012, with that number rising to $940 per game in 2013 (although players then had to pay for their own housing, which the league previously provided); starting quarterbacks receive a $300 per game bonus.[18] As of 2019, the IFL pays $200–$300 per game, with a $25 bonus for each win.[19] FCF pays $400 to $750 a week.[20]
Connection to the NFL[edit]
Some AFL players have gone on to have successful careers in the NFL, most notably Kurt Warner. Warner played college football at University of Northern Iowa and then quarterbacked the AFL's Iowa Barnstormers to ArenaBowl X in 1996 and ArenaBowl XI in 1997, before earning two NFL MVP Awards, a Super Bowl MVP Award and quarterbacking the St. Louis Rams and the Arizona Cardinals to the Super Bowl, winning Super Bowl XXXIV with the Rams. Warner was later inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the only person to play a substantial portion of his professional career (as opposed to a short publicity stunt, as was the case with Joe DeLamielleure's brief tenure in the sport) playing arena football.
Another, probably the second most notable behind Warner, could be Fred Jackson. Jackson played indoor football with the Sioux City Bandits in 2004 when they played in the NIFL (2004) and the UIF in 2005 before finally moving on to NFL Europa's Rhein Fire in 2006, then to the NFL after Rhein.
Following an initial undistinguished NFL career, being released or unsigned for four seasons out of eight, quarterback Tommy Maddox would revitalize himself with the AFL's New Jersey Red Dogs for one season before going on to quarterback the Los Angeles Xtreme to the XFL championship win and eventually return to the NFL for five seasons, retiring with a Super Bowl ring after the Pittsburgh Steelers won Super Bowl XL.
Other AFL to NFL graduates include Anthony Armstrong, Oronde Gadsden, Lincoln Coleman, Adrian McPherson, Rashied Davis, Jay Feely, David Patten, Rob Bironas, Antonio Chatman, Mike Vanderjagt, and Paul Justin. Former Arena Football League MVP Jay Gruden (brother of Jon Gruden) went on to coach the Orlando Predators of the AFL, Florida Tuskers of the United Football League, and then the head coach for the Washington Redskins in the NFL. Eddie Brown, voted in 2006 as the greatest player in AFL history,[5][6] never played in the NFL, but his son Antonio Brown joined the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2010 and was voted to the Pro Bowl in 2011 and in every season from 2013 to 2018. Matt Nagy was a quarterback in the AFL from 2002 to 2008 and became the head coach of the Chicago Bears in 2018.
Two players and one owner with substantial contributions (at least the majority of one season) have reached the Pro Football Hall of Fame: 2017 inductee Kurt Warner played the first three seasons of his professional career in the AFL, 2018 inductee Terrell Owens played his last professional season with the Indoor Football League in 2012, and the aforementioned Pat Bowlen was inducted into the Hall in 2019.
Green Bay Packers head coach Matt LaFleur was a quarterback for the Omaha Beef and the Billings Outlaws in the National Indoor Football League (NIFL). Running back Fred Jackson rushed for over 1,000 yards as the starting running back for the 2009 Buffalo Bills, and his high quality play earned him a spot on USA Today's "All-Joe" Team. Jackson played the early part of his professional football career for the Sioux City Bandits (now of Champions Indoor Football) and Michael Lewis played for the Louisiana Bayou Beast in 1999 and then with the New Orleans Saints.
The National Football League removed a ban that had been in place on any of its owners owning teams in any other sort of football operation with respect to Arena football only, and several of them had bought or started Arena teams at one point. However, the NFL allowed to lapse an option it had negotiated allowing it to purchase up to 49% of Arena football, and as of early 2007 seemed to have backed away from any plan it may have had to use Arena football as a developmental league in any sort of "official" sense, perhaps in the interest of not undermining its then-existing "official" developmental league, NFL Europa.
Several NFL owners owned Arena Football League teams in their own cities prior to the league's bankruptcy. At the end of the 2008 season, Jerry Jones and the Dallas Desperados (who had similar colors and logos to the Dallas Cowboys), Arthur Blank's Georgia Force, and the Colorado Crush (whose shareholders included Broncos owner Pat Bowlen and Rams then-minority owner Stan Kroenke) were still in the league. San Francisco 49ers owner Denise DeBartolo York and the Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder had future expansion rights to their respective cities. Tom Benson's original New Orleans VooDoo and Bud Adams's Nashville Kats had already folded prior to the bankruptcy and none of the NFL owners with AFL franchises returned to the league after its reformation in 2010, and most favored abolishing the league entirely.[21]
Dozens of former and current professional outdoor football players also have invested money into indoor football franchises.