A new AFL football team casts its spell on New Orleans
by Denise Trowbridge, New Orleans CityLife, February 2003
Tom Benson isn’t usually a superstitious guy. But when thousands of New Orleans football fans logged onto NewOrleansSaints.com to vote on a name for the city’s new arena football team and chose "The New Orleans VooDoo," he decided to consult a higher power. Benson went straight to the Archdiocese of New Orleans.
"He wanted to make sure that it’d be ok for us to use that name," says Mike Feder, the executive director of the Saints and the New Orleans VooDoo. "They gave it their blessing."
And with their blessings, the New Orleans VooDoo — the newest team to join the city’s professional sports offerings — will kick off in the New Orleans Arena for the first time on Feb. 14.
But sports fans won’t see a typical football game that day. The New Orleans VooDoo is part of a 19-team Arena Football League, an organization known for filling NFL’s offseason with a fast-paced, high-scoring, action-packed variation of traditional football.
The Game
It seems, at first, to be a half-size NFL.
The playing field is only 50 yards long. The goal posts are 9 feet across, less than half the size of the NFL’s, and are flanked by two rebound nets. That’s where the similarities end.
The clock, counting down four 15-minute quarters, never stops. Punting is illegal. Only eight men from each team are allowed on the field, and the versatile linemen play both sides of the ball — offense and defense.
The ball is never out of play, and there’s no such thing as out of bounds thanks to the 48-inch-tall barrier of high-density foam padding that surrounds the field. The players are so close they sometimes catch the ball then land in your lap.
At the end of the day, there are usually more than 100 points on the board between both teams.
"It’s possible to score on every possession," says head coach Mike Neu. "That’s why we need receivers who are fast and shifty playmakers. We have only three receivers and three defensive backs on a field with virtually no zone coverage. Winning or losing really depends on man-to-man match ups."
Neu insists that despite its diminutive dimensions and a few quirky rules, this is real football — real fun, real fast and real action-packed.
"There’s a lot of action," says Mickey Loomis, executive vice president and manager of football operations for the New Orleans Saints and the New Orleans VooDoo. "After your first game, you just get hooked."
Maybe it’s the league-mandated pyrotechnics show or the scantily clad VooDoo Dolls cheerleading squad that’ll keep the crowds coming back for more, but Feder thinks it’s simpler than that. "It’s just very good football," he says.
The Birth of a New Breed of Football
James Foster was watching an all-star soccer game in Madison Square Garden when the idea came to him. On the back of an envelope, he made a rudimentary sketch and a few notes.
That was in 1981. Foster, then a young NFL marketing executive, left that soccer game with the beginnings of the Arena Football League in the palm of his hand. In 1986, he sponsored a test game, and a year later, the experimental new league debuted with a six-game regular season and four teams: the Chicago Bruisers, the Denver Dynamite, the Pittsburgh Gladiators and the Washington Commandos.
Of course, Foster wasn’t the first man in the United States to imagine football beyond the NFL. Leagues have come and gone through the years. The outspoken XFL, referred to in a Wall Street Journal article as "the sex and violence bravado-filled flop of 2001," fizzled after one season. The United States Football League (1983-85) and the World Football League (1974-75) both failed in two seasons or less, while the American Football League (1960-69) eventually merged with the NFL.
But this AFL shows no signs of being short-lived. It’s lasted 17 years, has 19 teams taking the field this year and has an innovative profit-sharing television partnership with NBC. The network will broadcast more than 50 AFL games this season, including 10 New Orleans VooDoo games. The remaining six will appear on Cox Sports Television, and all will broadcast on local radio via either WSMB 1350 AM or WWL 870 AM. They’ll also air the AFL Arena Bowl, the league’s equivalent to the Super Bowl.
The AFL also has one thing no other professional sports league does: the only patented game-play system in professional sports. Thanks to this patent (no. 4,911,433), no one can ever legally form a competing football league that plays the same game.
And although the league toiled for 16 years in near obscurity — with teams in smaller markets like Albany, N.Y, and Des Moines, Iowa — before its broadcast debut on NBC in 2003, the AFL has the bones of a winner. Its 10th anniversary was marked with record attendance — more than 1 million fans turned up at games in 1996. Soon after, dynamo quarterback Kurt Warner went from the AFL’s Iowa Barnstormers to Super Bowl MVP with the St. Louis Rams. Now, more than 2 million fans turn out each season for the AFL and AFL2, the AFL’s developmental league.
The league also boasts a "Fans’ Bill of Rights" that may make it the most fan-friendly organization in professional sports. In it, the AFL pledges that each event will be family-oriented and affordable; that means no profane language and ticket prices starting at only $6. And after every game, win or lose, the fans are invited onto the field to meet the players.
The growing ranks of fans, as well as the talented players who have jumped head first into the NFL, are only part of the momentum behind the burgeoning league. A cadre of high profile people have purchased teams, including NFL team owners such as the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones and William Ford Jr. of the Detroit Lions. Even rock star Jon Bon Jovi is in on the action, as owner of the Philadelphia Soul. The Soul will be the first team to go head-to-head with the VooDoo at Philadelphia on Feb. 8.
The Serious Southern Business of Football
"In the South, it’s politics, religion and football, and in no particular order," at least according to Glenn Menard, the assistant general manager of the New Orleans Arena. Perhaps it is this southern priority list that encouraged Tom Benson to dive head first into AFL team ownership.
In 1998, he became the first NFL team owner to purchase an AFL expansion team. Benson noticed that in New Orleans people talked about football year round, and it was his goal to give them something good to talk about, even in the spring. "That’s why he thought the arena league would be a good fit for New Orleans," Feder says. "He’s a big fan of the AFL and thinks it’ll be a great complement to the Saints."
But it took six long years to go from franchise agreement to kick off. "It just wasn’t urgent," Feder says. He notes that they wanted to watch the league for a while and see where it was going. They also needed to finalize the lease with the Arena. "Without the keys to the building in hand, you can’t do anything," he says.
It took nearly nine months to finalize the deal with the Arena, and the VooDoo’s inaugural season was pushed from 2003 to 2004. Negotiations to bring the Hornets basketball team to New Orleans also slowed the VooDoo’s launch. "We just thought it’d be a good idea to wait another year and let the Hornets settle in before we introduced a new sports team," Loomis says.
In the meantime, they attended meetings and tried to find the coach who could help them build the team they wanted. Mickey Loomis knows what it takes to be a good coach in the NFL, but didn’t quite know where to start with the AFL. So he decided to ask around. One of the men he asked was Mike Neu, then head coach of the Carolina Cobras. "I came away from that meeting with a pretty good idea of what I wanted in a coach," Loomis says. "He needed to be young with lots of energy, and really be able to relate to the players from a recruiting standpoint."
It turned out that Neu was who Loomis was looking for.
"We really hit it off from the beginning," Loomis says. "Before I was ready to hire anyone, Mike said he’d be interested in coaching in New Orleans. It was just too good an opportunity to pass up."
With the keys to the arena in one hand and a head coach in the other, the time was ripe to bring arena football to New Orleans.
Winning Matters
Sports fans jog your memories. In 1991, an ambitious bunch of football players took the field in the Louisiana Superdome for a match against Tampa Bay. No, it’s not the Saints against longtime rivals the Buccaneers, it’s the New Orleans Night versus the Tampa Bay Storm.
That was New Orleans’ first Arena Football League home game. The Night played only nine more, lasting only two seasons — thanks in part to an 0-10 record in 1992 — before owners Mike McBath, Bill Hampton and David Briggs sold the team, and it moved to New Jersey.
No one is quite sure why the Night didn’t last, but Feder has two theories: "First, they played in the Superdome, which isn’t a very personal venue. A close-up and personal experience is an integral part of the arena football game," he says. "And second, they didn’t win one game in their second season."
Can a winning season really make or break a new team? Neu thinks so. "Everyone wants to support a winner," he says. "If the team isn’t winning the stands are empty." Neu hopes a winning inaugural season will help build a strong relationship between the players, who are comparably talented but less known than their NFL counterparts, and the fans.
And it’s Neu’s task to build this winning team. First, he turned to the pool of AFL free agents. Neu says he was lucky because there were 226 this year. "Most NFL and college guys usually don’t know how to play on both sides of the ball," he says. "That’s why it’s important to get guys who know how to play our game."
Neu has had a lot of luck winning them over, too. "We’ve been able to attract top-notch, free agents because our facilities are first class." The VooDoo has its own new 12,420-square-foot practice facility at the Saints’ headquarters on Airline Drive, and the close proximity to the Saints has also been a big draw. While the AFL insists it is not a farm league for the NFL, it’s no secret Saints’ wide receiver and kick returner Michael Lewis played for the AFL with the now-defunct New Jersey Red Dogs. Other NFL standouts are also AFL alumni, including Kurt Warner, David Patten and Tommy Maddox.
Free agents aside, more than 600 hopefuls turned up for three, daylong team try-out camps. A lucky few made the cut and were sent to training camp in January. AFL teams are much smaller than those in the NFL, so of the 37 who made it to camp, only 24 made the team. "Sending 13 guys home disappointed on the last day of camp," Neu says, "that’s the worst day of the year."
It all boils down to the game. "When you go to camp on January 11 and have to play your first game on February 8," he says, you don’t have time to really train your players. They have to hit the ground running. "We need to know they can perform when the bullets are flying."
Winning team or no, it doesn’t look like the New Orleans VooDoo will share the fate of their New Orleans Night predecessors. Mike Feder’s goal is to sell 8,000 season tickets. The highest price seats, at $792 each for the season, sold out in November. He’s hoping to fill the stands with 13,000 fans every game.
With the cheapest season tickets clocking in at $88 and commitment-phobic football fans able to get their hands on individual game tickets for $6 to $12, Feder may just get his wish. "It isn’t about winning or losing," he says. "It’s about the two and a half hours of fun. It’s a party."
Maybe. But maybe it is also something more than New Orleans’ penchant for partying.
"People in New Orleans love football. They love the Saints," says Loomis. "They are dedicated and excited fans. It’ll take time to build that kind of loyalty to the VooDoo, but we’re putting a great football team together. And when the football is this good, the rest just falls in place."