Connor Orr of Sports Illustrated wrote a very detailed piece about the demise of the Alliance of American Football. In the piece he notes that the league’s TV situation may have played a large role in angel investor Tom Dundon pulling the plug in the middle of the inaugural season.
Orr reports that Dundon called a high level executive at one of the four major networks to ask about the AAF’s current TV situation and he did not like the answer he received about the league’s future. “While it wouldn’t necessarily always be this way, the AAF would have to continue paying to be on the air for the foreseeable future. The Alliance would remain an underdog fighting for TV time in a crowded sports marketplace.”
Television coverage of the AAF was spread across multiple networks. Most games aired on either CBS Sports Network or NFL Network. A handful of games also showed up on CBS and TNT. Turner’s OTT streaming platform B/R Live also had exclusive rights to a few games.
While the AAF did have some ratings success, it is easy to understand why Dundon wouldn’t want to sink more money into a property that had to pay to be on TV in the first place, and was usually topping out at around 400,000 viewers.
The Comeback’s Andrew Bucholtz notes that there is a disturbing lesson for future start up leagues in the AAF’s TV situation. “The TV situation looks to be an important part of the puzzle for any future start-up football leagues, given that much of the appeal here is ‘football you can watch when it’s not NFL season,’ but these AAF reports suggest networks didn’t value the product all that highly in their case.”
