The 50-yard Indoor Morgue

The Arena Football League has bounced its last field goal off the cross bars after 21 thoroughly goofily entertaining seasons. Jim Foster came up with the concept while watching indoor soccer and in 1987 introduced the 50-yard indoor war, with giant nets on either side of the crossbar that kept errant passes and kicks in play, and ironman play, with only the quarterback not going both ways. The game was heavy on passing and scoring, and at a 1995 game I attended, the St. Louis Stampede beat the Milwaukee Mustangs 67-65 to set the league record for most combined points in a game. The record fell the next day. For many of the league’s early years, the fun of the offseason was guessing which teams would be closing up shop permanently and which would relocate, like the Gladiators who moved from East Rutherford, NJ to Las Vegas to Cleveland. All told the league included more than 60 teams in 49 cities. But in recent years, it seemed the league had turned the corner, with TV deals, celebrity owners like Jon Bon Jovi and John Elway, franchise stability and last season teams averaged 13,000 fans, with the last league champion Philadelphia Soul routinely drawing more than 16,000. As consolation, the Soul get to hold onto the Arena Bowl trophy. Ironically the NBC deal actually hurt the league as it included a partnership with the network, which resulted in little to no coverage by ESPN. Not that the worldwide leader in sports would be anything but a paragon of journalistic ethics. Celebrity ownership also pulled the league more toward the mainstream, and free substitution replaced the ironman ethos. The league had suspended the 2009 season citing the economic downturn, but decided the pull the plug last week.