Reports said the Alliance of American Football got a bailout, but it’s co-founder says it was a buy-in
Alliance of American Football co-founder Charlie Ebersol on Tuesday attempted to rebut reports that the first-year league was in dire financial shape and needed a massive infusion of cash to make payroll, in the form of a $250 million investment from Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon.
In an interview with the Orlando Sentinel’s Mike Bianchi, Ebersol framed the investment as a buy-in from a businessman who saw a good opportunity to get in on the ground floor. He claimed the league was not in serious financial jeopardy before Dundon’s cash infusion, contradicting a report in the Athletic that said the league needed the money to make payroll after only its first weekend of games.
“We are a start-up, and start-ups usually raise money in pieces — there’s a Series A piece, Series B, Series C, etc.,” Ebersol said. “After the success of the first week, we had a number of investors come to us and offer us all kinds of different investments. Tom Dundon showed up and said, ‘Do you want to continue to raise Series B, Series C and Series D or do you want to raise Series Infinity right now and be taken care of from now on.’ That was an offer I was not going to refuse.”
The AAF, co-founded by Ebersol and longtime NFL personnel executive Bill Polian, previously had received funding from a number of high-profile venture capital firms, including the Founders Fund backed by billionaire Peter Thiel and the Chernin Group, which also owns a majority stake in Barstool Sports.
The Action Network’s Darren Rovell reported Tuesday that the league missed payroll during its first week, with player agents being told it was because of a “glitch with switching to a new administrator.” The players — who all have identical non-guaranteed contracts worth $250,000 over three years — were paid Tuesday, Rovell reported, and Ebersol told Bianchi that the league had the money to meet payroll, even before Dundon’s investment.
Dundon seemed to confirm this to Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio on Wednesday.
“The league has many years of cash if things don’t go according to plan,” Dundon said. “The way we set it up, I think, is well in excess of what I think we’ll need for the league to be sustainable or profitable without me having to prop it up.”
He added that he told Ebersol and Polian that they started the league too quickly (the AAF’s first games took place less than one year after it was officially announced).
“You shouldn’t have done it so fast, you shouldn’t have done it with the capital structure, but it’s pretty amazing what you accomplished,” Dundon said he told the co-founders.
The Hurricanes confirmed Dundon’s investment on Tuesday and announced that he would become chairman of the AAF board of directors. Ebersol, however, stopped short of calling Dundon the league’s de facto owner in his comments to Bianchi, saying merely that he had become the league’s “biggest investor” who bought in after the league’s first weekend of games received generally positive reviews and stronger-than-expected TV ratings.
“After that first week of games, we were at the height of our valuation and were able to dictate our future,” Ebersol said.
“If I was going to describe to you my dream investor, I would have told you a 47-year-old football fan who has professional sports ownership experience and is self-made — a man who went from zero to billions of dollars completely on his own work. That describes Tom Dundon,” he continued. “In my wildest dreams, I didn’t think we would be able to get someone like Tom Dundon to come in the way he did.”
The first two AAF games were broadcast by CBS on Feb. 9 and drew 3.25 million viewers, more than an NBA game airing on ABC at the same time. A game the next day on NFL Network drew 640,000 viewers. Numbers for the league’s Week 2 games on Saturday and Sunday have yet to be released.
How Christian Hackenberg is trying to rebuild his career in the Alliance of American Football
It hasn't been the easiest thing to watch. Likely not the easiest thing to go through, either. That much is clear two weeks into Christian Hackenberg's first time as a professional starting quarterback, with the Memphis Express of the Alliance of American Football.
He has been hit. A lot. One, on a scramble Saturday night against the Arizona Hotshots, was so vicious that Hackenberg felt like he'd run into a concrete wall. He has been sacked six times and scrambled away from defenders on eight other snaps.
Hackenberg is constantly under pressure. Receivers have dropped passes and been slow on routes. His statistics -- he has completed 24 of 58 passes for 189 yards, 1 rushing touchdown and 1 interception in two losses -- aren't good. He has thrown for less than half of the 393 yards that the league's leading passer, Orlando's Garrett Gilbert, threw for Sunday afternoon.
It has been rough, both from his own play and what has gone on around him. Of course, this is why Hackenberg is here as the quarterback for the winless Express in the nascent AAF. To prove he had conquered the throwing issues that plagued him with the New York Jets, turning a 2016 second-round pick into a player who has yet to take an NFL regular-season snap. To show that he can still play.
"I just view it as the chance. Right now it is the opportunity that's at my door," Hackenberg said last month, before his two woeful starts. "And I think as a player, as a person going through life, you can't worry about the next chance or the chance that came before or what happened before.
"If you're worried about all that stuff you're going to miss what's standing there knocking in front of your face."
He has shown improvement from his first week to his second week, but he's a long way from where he wants to be -- the NFL.
While Hackenberg has been an NFL prospect for years -- starting with his freshman season at Penn State in 2013 - he's still only 24 years old. It's why Hackenberg decided to go to the AAF. He needed reps. He needed to show he could still be valuable and that his career was closer to its beginning than its end, despite being traded from the New York Jets to Oakland in May and then bouncing around the NFL.
Who's in this new league? Where can I watch? What are the major rules differences? We're answering every question.
The AAF's opening weekend wasn't perfect, but decent play and interesting in-game innovations should keep fans coming back.
Alliance of American Football co-founder Bill Polian told The Athletic that the league spoke with quarterbacks Colin Kaepernick and Tim Tebow about joining the league, but both declined.
2 Related
A little over a year ago, his throws lacked any control, and he needed to figure out why. During his exit interview with the Jets following the 2017 season, coaches said he had a significant flaw in his throwing motion. They didn't know where it started. They didn't believe it was fixable.
Hackenberg didn't believe that.
"I'm a perfectionist when I think about things," Hackenberg said. "If I can do this so many times in a row and then there are those three or four where it's like, 'Where did that come from?' Why does that happen?
"I was searching and searching and searching for answers, coaches, and no one was giving me anything that necessarily worked."
Hackenberg wasn't sure what happened in New York, only that he was broken. He, his family and his agents, Rich Rosa and Noel Lamontagne, had a conversation after the Jets' revelation.
Someone had to be able to fix him. Lamontagne reached out to NFL contacts. They returned with a name, longtime NFL quarterbacks coach David Lee, who agreed to look at Hackenberg. Lee met him for a weekend. He diagnosed the problems, which in layman's terms were elongations in his throwing motion starting in college and gradually worsening over time. It caused Hackenberg, subconsciously, to be altering his release point and occasionally flipping the ball. He thought he controlled where the ball went. Too many times, he didn't.
Lee knew someone who could help and passed along a name: Jeff Christensen, who worked him out in Chicago a week later. Christensen played college football at Eastern Illinois and was a fifth-round pick by Cincinnati in 1983. He has worked with quarterbacks such as Patrick Mahomes and Jimmy Garoppolo in the past.
"After two days of [throwing] and looking at the film, I said, 'Hey, here's what you're doing. Here's why you're doing it. Here's what's causing it,'" Christensen said. "So basically, if we don't get it here, and I showed him the appropriate films of guys that do it properly.
"I said, 'Do you see the difference?' He said, 'Oh yeah, completely.'"
Hackenberg had no choice. He had to trust Christensen or else his career could be kaput. In case Hackenberg didn't totally understand, Christensen made it clear.
"I said, 'OK, well, if we don't get you here or close to here, your career is over. You're done,'" Christensen said. "I say that to a lot of guys, and most of the time, it bothers him. He looked me dead in the eye and said, 'Yeah. I know that.'"
At dinner over halibut that night at Wildfire, an Oak Brook, Illinois, eatery that is a Christensen favorite, Hackenberg showed his seriousness about fixing his problem. Hackenberg asked about the next day. Christensen told him they would throw at 10 a.m. and then watch film.
"He said, I don't leave for two days, can we throw in the afternoon? I said, 'You want to throw twice a day?'" Christensen said. "He goes, why not, I'm here. So you want two-a-days? He's like, 'Yeah, my arm doesn't ever get sore, so yeah, I want to get this fixed.'"
So it began.
Over the next 90 days, Christensen said he and Hackenberg held 137 practices. Christensen worked a variety of 30 different drills -- he declined to give specifics of his process -- to work on reversing Hackenberg's messed-up motion.
Whatever felt comfortable to Hackenberg at the beginning was wrong. He needed to go through the unlearning and correcting process of pushing and prodding with different drills in order to reconstruct his game.
Hackenberg committed. Every week, he would fly in and stay at The Drake Hotel, work out with Christensen, then head home for the weekend. He spent his birthday last year, on Valentine's Day, with Christensen in Chicago. They FaceTimed his fiancée. She supported him. His whole family did.
They understood what it meant. By the fifth day, Christensen said Hackenberg bought into the process, designed with the thought that there's only one way to throw the football -- similar to Tom Brady, Dan Marino, John Elway and Joe Montana.
Somewhere between practice No. 90 and 95, Christensen saw what he needed. He knew Hackenberg got it. Christensen filmed every throw of every practice. There was a two-day stretch during those five practices in which Christensen said, "it just kind of all changed."
"He threw three in a row, like here's what we're doing and he threw it and kind of looked at me," Christensen said. "I'm like, 'That's it, bro. Again.' He looked at me again, and every time, his eyes got a little bit bigger. That's it. He threw the last one and it was perfect, and I said, 'OK, look at it.' We don't ever do this, but I told the receivers to go get a drink, come here, Christian, and said, 'Look. Look.' I replayed the films, and I never replay the films of the workout.
"I replayed the throws during the workout and his eyes got really big, and I said, 'Do you understand now?' He goes, 'Yep.' It's starting to feel a little better now, right?"
The receivers said they were Hackenberg's best three passes all day. Velocity, accuracy and spin were all on point. The next three weeks, there were small deviations on his first day back working with Christensen.
Since then, there hadn't been.
"I watched the tape, compared, saw things, saw myself get better and started to understand the why behind those things," Hackenberg said. "So now I don't have that anxiety of, like, 'Why'd I miss?' I'm like, 'Now I know.'"
While his AAF numbers haven't showed it yet, his mechanics have stayed consistent with what he reworked, Christensen told ESPN.
Just because Hackenberg's motion is fixed doesn't mean he's guaranteed success. The past two weekends proved that. In the past year, Hackenberg went from the Jets to the Raiders to the Eagles to the Bengals, and now to the Express. Lamontagne said he could have signed a futures deal with an NFL team, but he chose to go to the AAF to get reps.
The Express, for now, are his best chance at success. Memphis' offensive philosophy so far has appeared conservative -- Express coach Mike Singletary said they are still searching for an offensive identity -- rarely allowing Hackenberg to take downfield shots when he has time to throw.
Lee is his quarterbacks coach in Memphis, so he knows where Hackenberg was and where he is now. Hackenberg beat out Brandon Silvers and Zach Mettenberger in camp and got what he craved: a chance to play; show he's a different quarterback. So far, Hackenberg remains the Express starter despite the team's early issues. Singletary said they won't have a "knee-jerk response" if he continues to struggle and calls it a "delicate balance" between his growth and trying to make it come at a faster pace.
"We still have to do a good job of continuing to find out what makes him comfortable, what he likes, and at the same time the things that we have to do to help our offense grow and expand it," Singletary told reporters Monday. "I think he's coming along well, and he made considerable improvement from Week 1, and we're going to try and build on that."
There have been signs of progress amid the struggles. The fourth quarter against the Hotshots -- when Hackenberg led Memphis on a touchdown drive -- is the best he has looked so far.
Hackenberg likely hasn't done enough to get another shot in the NFL, but in an era in which quarterbacks stick around in the NFL until their mid-30s or later, he still has a chance.
If this works, he has a lot of football left and a career he can save. It's just a big if.
"All the experiences, being cut, being drafted, ups, downs, highs, lows, all those things have kind of put me here right now," Hackenberg said before his first game. "And I think mentally I'm at peace with it, and I've never been, I think, in a better spot from a physical standpoint but also from a mental standpoint combined in my career."
Hey, Alliance of American Football: Week 2 is awfully early for a new league to be throwing a $250 million Hail Mary
The Alliance of American Football’s efforts to speed up the game apparently are not limited to the field.
The Alliance, it seems, came perilously close to running out of money heading into Week 2 of its debut season, which, while perhaps not a record, is very fast work nevertheless.
All that saved the AAF last week was a $250 million investment from Tom Dundon, owner of the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes, according to the Athletic.
If not for Dundon, the Alliance would have been Dunfor.
An agent representing several AAF players reportedly told Pro Football Talk on Friday that some paychecks weren’t received. PFT said the AAF blamed the delay on “an administrative glitch.”
Like not having enough money in the checking account, perhaps? Who doesn’t hate that kind of glitch?
Dundon now becomes chairman of the fledgling AAF as well as its biggest investor, holding a very expensive lottery ticket.
He’s betting on a league that aspires not to compete with the NFL but complement it.
That avoids an expensive miscalculation that doomed earlier upstarts, such as the United States Football League and the World Football League.
Few fledgling leagues get absorbed by their more established rivals on a more or less equal basis. Among the fortunate few have been the American Football League merging with NFL, the American Basketball Association merging with the NBA and the World Hockey Association merging with the NHL.
But it requires the Alliance to thread a slender needle for Dundon to see a return on his outsize investment.
“We could be the training ground for the NFL,” co-founder Bill Polian said on the Alliance’s opening night.
If the AAF, which owns all eight of its teams, can sell itself as place for would-be NFL players to be schooled on fundamentals and tested by game situations, perhaps it can sell itself to the NFL and become its official developmental league.
Failing that, the AAF may continue to struggle financially a year from now, when it must compete head-to-head with a new iteration of the failed XFL from pro wrestling entrepreneur Vince McMahon.
The closest parallel to the AAF’s early financial stumble may be the Professional Spring Football League. The PSFL folded during its inaugural training camp in 1992, 10 days before the scheduled season opener.
Some sports confederations, such as the Continental Baseball League and the Global Hockey League, never get off the ground.
Once launched, however, it usually takes a new league months, sometimes years, to reach the brink of insolvency and fail to make payroll.
Phelan M. Ebenhack / AP
Atlanta Legends receiver Bug Howard is tackled by Orlando Apollos safety Will Hill and defensive back Keith Reaser after catching a pass during the first half of an Alliance of American Football game on Feb. 9, 2019, in Orlando, Fla.
Atlanta Legends receiver Bug Howard is tackled by Orlando Apollos safety Will Hill and defensive back Keith Reaser after catching a pass during the first half of an Alliance of American Football game on Feb. 9, 2019, in Orlando, Fla. (Phelan M. Ebenhack / AP)
Here, this brainchild of Polian, the Hall of Fame NFL executive, and TV sports industry scion Charlie Ebersol was poised to do it after its first weekend.
Well played, sirs. Well played.
The AAF’s stadiums seem to have had a lot of empty seats, but Ebersol and company couldn’t possibly have been foolish enough to count on opening-weekend gate receipts to make or break the operation.
It will be interesting to see how this colors what had seemed an auspicious start for the AAF.
The league’s Feb. 9 debut on CBS — two prime-time games airing simultaneously to various parts of the country — attracted 3.25 million viewers, outdrawing an NBA telecast opposite it on ABC featuring a Thunder come-from-behind victory over the Rockets.
Not everyone loved what they saw, but the AAF got generally good reviews.
So did league innovations, including eliminating kickoffs and point-after-touchdown kicks, a shorter play clock than the NFL, the absence of TV timeouts and SkyJudge, an official in the press box who can intervene on badly mistaken rulings by the referee and field crew.
What Alliance players tend to lack in name recognition is offset by coaches such as former Bears great Mike Singletary, Mike Martz, Steve Spurrier, Dennis Erickson and Rick Neuheisel. League leadership includes Troy Polamalu, Hines Ward, Mike Pereira and Dean Blandino.
Who knows the cost of bringing them together? Who among them was smart enough to get paid up front? Does SkyJudge penalize Ebersol and Polian for poor fiscal management?
Had the AAF perished, it would not have been for lack of exposure. Besides CBS and CBS Sports Network, TV and streaming media partners include NFL Network, Turner Sports and Bleacher Report.
Investors include Shaquille O’Neal, MGM Resorts International and the Chernin Group, which has stakes in such ventures as Barstool Sports, the Athletic and the Action Network.
Each presumably now owes Dundon undying gratitude and a Hallmark “Thank you for saving my investment from going belly up” card.
Week 2 is awfully early for a new football league to be throwing a Hail Mary under the threat of everyone being sacked.
philrosenthal@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @phil_rosenthal
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