The A-11 New Spring Football League gets a major TV Partner, and officially launches today with a press conference at 10 am.
And while I can’t yet say who that television partner is just yet, I can explain that its a major sports organization. The TV company does not own the organization but will have exclusive rights to televise the football game based on rules created for the A-11 Offense that was originally developed at Piedmont High School in Piedmont, California in 2007.
That offense, which took advantage of a high school football rule that allowed no designated jersey numbers when scrimmage kick formations were used to make a set of formations and plays where the defense could not determine which offensive player could catch the football, was outlawed in American high schools by 2009.
The A-11 Offense creators Steven Humphries and Kurt Bryan, pushed on in their advocacy of this new style of football.
In 2012 the idea of a league came up, and then and it seemed very quickly in 2013, Humphries and Bryan went from being concept sellers, to gaining an investor, and then the ability to hire the former head of The Rose Bowl, and person who helped me form the bid to try and bring the Super Bowl to Oakland, Scott McKibben, who’s the league’s commissioner.
And then the Major TV Partner came into the picture. Now the A-11 New Spring Football League is a reality.
The A-11 organization will play in NFL stadiums and has successfully purchased the rights to the names of the teams of the USFL Football League. So, there will be the LA Express, and the New Jersey Generals, to name two of the teams – there will be teams in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in Tampa Bay, too.
The idea of the A-11 is such that a player like Tim Tebow, who Steven Humphries openly desires to have involved in the league, could play in the spring game and “yet be able to cary out his other obligations with the SEC and other organizations,” Steven said.
The A-11 minders aren’t trying to compete with the NFL at all, and see their league as one that fosters the development of players. As Humphries, the Cal-Berkeley-grad, told me, “We have so many NFL-ready players to choose from” to develop a game that fans want to see.
The press conference is at 10 AM PST, 1 PM EST today.
Stay tuned.