what killed NFL Europe?

‘You didn’t play to get rich’: what killed NFL Europe?

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/jun/23/you-didnt-play-to-get-rich-what-killed-nfl-europe

In 2007, the NFL folded up the European tents after 16 years and a reported $30m in annual losses. Sean Keeler recalls an experiment of audacious lunacy

Mostly, he remembers emptying the playbook like there was no damn tomorrow, because, as it turns out, there wasn’t. The Hamburg Sea Devils’ second touchdown was a 35-yard flea flicker, a rainbow that found gold. Their fourth came on a fake reverse. No stone was left unturned, no dagger unblemished, no ruse untouched.

“We had saved a few things for that game that we hadn’t run all year,” recalls Casey Bramlet, Hamburg’s quarterback for World Bowl XV and defending NFL Europe champion for … well, nine years running now. “Luckily they worked out. I remember one of their linebackers, after we hit another big play on them – he was so mad. And they weren’t prepared for it. He said: ‘Just play football.’”

On 23 June 2007, Bramlet threw for 347 yards and four touchdowns in a 37-28 Hamburg victory over Frankfurt, the highest-scoring title game in the history of NFL Europa/NFL Europe/World League of American Football. It also happened to be the last championship game: on June 29, the NFL folded up the tents, closing its spring developmental league after 16 years and a reported $30m in annual losses.

“I think, in the end, it probably comes down to money,” says Bramlet, these days a financial adviser in his native Wyoming, a husband, a father, and – as the final World Bowl MVP – the answer to a killer trivia question. “It’s a shame they don’t have one [today]. It was just starting to kind of pick up steam. I think they could’ve been successful. I don’t know how long it would’ve taken.

“When it was over, I said: ‘In the next five years, they’ll have another one.’ And here we are, nine years later, and we still don’t.”
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In hindsight, it reads as audacious lunacy, pitched somewhere between Terry Bradshaw and Terry Southern, the apex and nadir of Yankee sporting hubris dancing cheek-to-cheek across a curious but indifferent stage. Europe sent America its tired, its poor, its huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The NFL sent Europe its Shane Boyd, Ryan Van Dyke and BJ Symons.

“That’s the hard part,” Bramlet chuckles. “People don’t want to watch bad football.”

And therein lies the rub, nearly a decade after last rites. Like the Monkees and the vinyl renaissance, what’s old is new again: earlier this month, NFL executives floated the possibility of diving back into the developmental league pool, no doubt noticing the May-June black hole in the league’s live television calendar in an age when real-time content is one of the few bright lights still beaming across an oversaturated media plain. Coaches such as Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin, Baltimore’s John Harbaugh and New Orleans’ Sean Payton – the latter of whom once played quarterback in England for the Leicester Panthers – have tossed their weight behind the idea in recent years.

“We’ve reached a point where we really should be looking more at a developmental league, and I really expect that to begin here in the next year or so,” Dallas Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones, a member of the league’s competition committee, told CBS Sports. “We lost a lot of money on NFL Europe, but there were a lot of things the league did well and for all of those reasons – coaches, officiating, players, quarterbacks in particular – it’s something we really do need to be looking at and studying. The time might be right to do it.”
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So what was the problem? The Europe part? The spring football part? The scout team part? All of the above? Were the ratings and budgetary bars set too high? By NFL standards, NFL Europe was a financial turkey: according to a 2007 ESPN.com autopsy, the league never sniffed a profit as a European-only enterprise. Like any start-up, it was continually tweaked, re-tweaked, re-painted and rebranded. Launched as the WLAF in 1991, it bombed in domestic outposts such as Birmingham, Orlando and San Antonio while the curiosity factor gained the circuit some traction in London, Frankfurt and Barcelona. For a while.

Yet it was also a venture that gave former Vikings and Saints wide receiver Mike Jones, an African American, his first head coaching gig at the age of 44. It created a laboratory for up-and-coming coaches and officials and a trial balloon for rules and broadcast experiments.

“You know the field camera that they use in the NFL? They used it in NFL Europe,” says Jones, who would steer the Frankfurt Galaxy to three World Bowls in four seasons, winning the loop’s penultimate crown in 2006. “These parties that they have before the games, the concerts … they did that in NFL Europe. I think a lot of things came from the testing in NFL Europe of what would be good and what would not be good.”

Arguably the most significant fossils NFL Europe left behind were the games themselves – live game action for the bottom half of NFL rosters and, more importantly, live game footage. Yes, it involved players many Americans hadn’t heard of, let alone a bemused German, Spanish, Dutch or Scottish audience. Yes, it was essentially the competitive equivalent of the fourth preseason tilt over any given August, practice squads dressed in different colors crossing swords on a different continent. Yes, the echo-ey Fox broadcasts often sounded as if the games were contested within the confines of a gargantuan metal pipe.

Which isn’t to say that, even if the casts and sets were flawed, the basic premise somehow lacked merit. Or reconsideration. To put it another way, as a football consumer, which option would you prefer in the spring: the chance to watch – even sporadically – an eight-team, seven-week spring developmental loop; or copious internet reports from “Organized Team Activities,” or OTAs, a menu that consists primarily of players in helmets and shorts playing glorified two-hand touch?

“It was a league to develop talents, to develop guys from what they were into what they could be,” says Jason Hall, a former defensive end with Buffalo, Carolina and Tennessee who found his stride – and his mojo – with the Cologne Centurions in 2007 as NFL Europe’s last Defensive MVP.

“For me, that absolutely happened. The value was just in terms of [the fact] guys that are on the lower end of the roster, you’re not getting much better in OTAs. You’re not getting much better, honestly, in camps. Maybe just in position-drill work, but in terms of your overall game, you’re talking about team stuff, 11-on-11 … you’re just not getting the quality reps that you need. It’s one thing to do things in shorts and helmets and all that, but football, especially when you’re talking about line play — this is all physicality, this is all hand-to-hand combat. And if you’re not getting that stuff at full-speed, full-tilt, it’s just not the same.”
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Cologne offered Hall plenty of physicality, plenty of combat, plenty of full-speed reps and enough space to sink or swim. Undrafted out of the University of Tennessee, it also afforded a reprieve from the angst of roster math. When his position coach encouraged the 6ft 3in pass-rusher to stop thinking, to ditch the paralysis by analysis and just play, things started to click.

“Sometimes the best way to develop players is giving them less to chew on,” Hall says, “and really just allowing them to be successful with a limited toolbox. And then you can add from there. But if you throw them the whole toolbox to see if they could get it (at once), nobody really does.

“A lot of it is just read-and-react. It’s football, and that’s what I realized going into my senior year of college and finally in NFL Europe: ‘Man, it’s just football.’”

They were units of the unproven, the unknown (and in many cases) the unwanted, us-against-the-world on the other side of the globe. Lifelong friendships were formed in the journeys from hotel to stadium to hotel again, the travails of a league that some of its staffers gleefully referred to as “NFL Economy.” Jones says they usually took two train rides the whole season, and “the rest of the time, we were on the bus … we knew how to spend that money over there.”

“You were a group of 40 guys and you’re in a hotel, you’re all in the same hotel, you all eat at the same little cafeteria every day and so you’re [with] each other all the time,” Bramlet recalls. “I think you formed more of a bond, more of a college feel versus an NFL feel.”

In the decade since, Bramlet would return to Europe with his wife to revisit those old haunts and bonds. Hall says he’s been back to Germany twice. For Jones, the league presented a chance to teach players about representing their families, franchises, and their home country abroad. And for his daughters, then middle-school age, it was an opportunity “to visit way more places than I could ever imagine. Rome. Paris. Every other day, they were on a train going somewhere, so it was a great experience for them, because here they [were] given an opportunity to go in a foreign land and travel as freely as they wanted to.”

The NFL’s commitment to its “International Series”– in which a smattering of regular-season contests are played in London, an agreement that some have surmised as a dry run for possible relocation or expansion – probably puts the odds of a return to a European satellite operation between slim and none. But NFL Europe alums don’t see why the core developmental concepts there couldn’t float in principle here. Same calendar, different country.

“To be quite honest, the World League should’ve been in the States, NFL Europe should’ve been in the States,” says Hall, a trainer who works with 60-some clients at Kettle Corps in Marietta, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. “I understand the [desire] to ‘globalize’ the game. It wasn’t the right strategy to globalize the game. The value of a developmental league is still there, regardless of where you’re going to have it. We had our training camps in Tampa. Literally, you could have the whole league in Tampa. Literally, you could play back-to-back games on the same field.

“People are scared of spring ball. People are scared of that, because the NFL has such a monopoly on the game. People are afraid of trying to corner any space in that market, because you have a fear of just getting crushed.”

And as long as the NCAA is providing the milk – in this case, labor – for free, why invest in another herd of cows? Even the results of the NFL Europe’s strongest argument, quarterback development, can be taken as something of a mixed bag. Super Bowl starters Kurt Warner, Brad Johnson and Jake Delhomme all famously apprenticed in the circuit at one point or another, while Jon Kitna and Scott Mitchell used the league as a springboard for solid (if unspectacular) careers of their own.
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All of which inevitably dovetails into the counter-argument: for every Warner to come out of NFL Europe, you could point to five Spergon Wynns. The top 10 highest-rated career passers in the league’s history – Danny Wuerffel, David Archer, Rohan Davey, Jim Arellanes, JT O’Sullivan, Reggie Slack, Dave Ragone, Gibran Hamdan, Craig Nall and Jonathan Quinn – would combine for just 49 regular-season NFL starts, nearly half of which belong to Archer (23), with a collective 47 regular-season touchdowns and 71 interceptions among them. As with David Hasselhoff’s singing career, what sells in Deutschland doesn’t always always rack up the same numbers stateside.

“I remember telling people that you don’t play over there to get rich,” says Bramlet, whose resume included stints with six NFL clubs and the CFL’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers. “You went over there to play and to get some experience and to get some more game film. Because a lot of the time, you were going over there knowing that you were probably interviewing for the other 30-31 teams, because you knew you probably weren’t going to be with the same team when you got back.”

Roughly six weeks after he held the last World Bowl trophy aloft, Washington – the franchise that had allocated him – cut Bramlet loose.

“Yes, there are definitely benefits to keeping (players in-house), but you can’t replace getting live reps,” the former quarterback says. ”If you’re the starter or you’re the backup, it’s probably better to stay with your NFL team. But if you’re a fourth-string quarterback or a fourth-string guy, it’s probably better to go out there and get some reps.”

Pain is temporary. Tape is forever. Late in 2007, while Bramlet was practicing with the Miami Dolphins, Randy Mueller, then the club’s general manager, made a point to pull him aside. Given that this was his third club in less than six months, the former NFL Europe standout wasn’t sure what to think.

“Do you know why we signed you?” Mueller asked.

“Well, the reason we brought you in for a workout was that game in Frankfurt, the World Bowl. I watched you play in that game.”

“That was a direct effect of what I got from that,” Bramlet says. “Just having another opportunity to play and get better. You never know who’s watching. And sure enough, I ended up getting another opportunity because of that.”

What goes around comes around, eventually. Even from halfway across the world.