Pro Football Returning To Birmingham, But Will It Thrive?

BIRMINGHAM, AL - Birmingham is getting another shot at professional football, according to an announcement Monday by a new startup league that will play games in the winter and early spring.

The Alliance of American Football will include Birmingham among seven other cities to field teams for the new league. Birmingham joins Atlanta, Memphis, Orlando, Phoenix, San Diego and Salt Lake City as AAF locations. The league has already gone after some big names for head coaches, as Steve Spurrier, former Florida, South Carolina and Washing ton Redskins coach, has signed on to lead the Orlando franchise.

The league will kick off its 12-game season February 9. So, how will Birmingham fare? This announcement is the most recent in a series of "new league" announcements that have included Birmingham. Football teams with the World Football League, United States Football League, World League of American Football, Canadian Football League, Arena League and the XFL have all landed in Birmingham in hopes of the Magic City supporting a professional football team. And those are just the teams that actually ended up playing. Other pro or semi-pro leagues have announced a Birmingham team, but either the league folded before the Birmingham team could play a down, or the league chose another city instead.

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Birmingham has had an interesting history with professional sports. While the Birmingham Barons have been a mainstay in the community for decades, other professional teams have come and gone with varying success. The Birmingham Americans (later the Vulcans) of the World Football League in the early 1970s did not last two years, the first incarnation of the Birmingham Bulls hockey team lasted from 1976 to 1981, then came the Birmingham South Stars hockey team (which only lasted a year), the USFL's Birmingham Stallions football team arrived in 1983 and lasted until the league folded in 1985, a minor league basketball team in the Birmingham Bandits, which was followed by another Bulls hockey team (1992-2001), a World League of American Football team in the Birmingham Fire (1991-1993), one season of a Canadian Football League team (the Barracudas, 1995) and the Birmingham Steeldogs arena football team, which played from 2000 to 2005. And the recent announcement of a professional soccer team in Birmingham, the Birmingham Legion FC, has been met with overwhelming support.

Veteran sports writer and former sports editor for the Birmingham Post-Herald Scott Adamson said he has seen first hand all of Birmingham's football teams undergo the highs and lows of trying to achieve success in the Magic City. But Adamson said it has not always been the fault of the city itself when a team didn't make it in Birmingham.

"I think when you talk to most people they’ll tell you when it comes to Birmingham and off-brand pro football, the league failed, not the city," Adamson said. "From the WFL in 1974 through the XFL in 2001, fans showed up but the leagues either drowned in red ink (WFL), died by their own hands (the USFL opting to move to the fall) or got caught up in an experiment that simply didn’t work (the Canadian Football League’s expansion to the U.S.)."

Some critics point to the fanaticism of college football in Birmingham to a reason for the failure of professional football in the city. And Adamson agreed to some extent, but said other factors play into that.

"As for the Alliance of American Football or any other spring/summer league succeeding, I wish I knew the magic formula," Adamson said. "Unlike baseball, there is no traditional minor league infrastructure in pro football, and a league like this will have to convince fans that watching Triple A football in the offseason is worth their time and money. I think Birmingham will need a roster stocked with players from Alabama, Auburn, UAB and others with state ties to put people in the stands, and the league itself will have to play an 'exciting' brand of ball."

Adamson said the AAF is going to need to make an attempt to allign themselves with the NFL. "Ultimately, I think they’ll need an official relationship with the NFL (funding) to become viable," he said. "But as the World League of American Football and later NFL Europe and NFL Europa showed, sometimes even that’s not enough. I hope it succeeds, but like any startup, it’s a long shot."

Photo via Alabama News Center/Used with permission

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