Minor league football (gridiron)
Minor league football, also known as alternative football or secondary football, is an umbrella term for professional gridiron football that is played below the major league level.
The National Football League and Canadian Football League are both designated as major leagues, but contrary to the other major sports leagues in North America—Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League—no formal development farm system was in use after the NFL severed ties with all minor league teams in 1948. The developmental league concept was shuttered again with the cancellation of NFL Europe in 2006.
Since 2018, the CFL has had a partnership agreement with the Professional American Football League of Mexico for player development, but does not consider it a minor league in the traditional sense. In 2023, the NFL signed a collaboration agreement with the XFL on rules, equipment, and safety testing, but the agreement does not cover sharing players for developmental purposes.
There have been professional football leagues of varying levels since the invention of the sport, and over the years there have been attempts to organize development or farm leagues such as the Association of Professional Football Leagues and the World League of American Football, later known as NFL Europe and then NFL Europa, but they failed to produce profits and were eventually shut down. As a result, over time the North American leagues settled into an informal hierarchy, with many aspiring entrepreneurs trying to establish rival, alternative, or supplemental leagues to the NFL, similar to baseball's independent leagues. Apart from the All-America Football Conference and the American Football League, which merged with the NFL, none of the other leagues have succeeded, particularly because the leagues' inability to generate television revenue to keep them afloat in their first years of existence.
In modern times, the NFL has developed players not ready for the active roster through each team's practice squad, or relied on college football and separate entities like the now-defunct Arena Football League as their feeder organizations. Since the beginning of the 21st century, three fledgling pro football leagues—the United Football League, the Fall Experimental Football League and the Alliance of American Football —had hoped to create a relationship with the NFL as developmental minor leagues, but all folded without any such connection being made. Nevertheless, some players did find a path to the NFL through those leagues, especially the high-level ones like the AAF, XFL, and United States Football League.
Currently, there are four active minor leagues in North America: the United Football League, the Gridiron Developmental Football League, the Rivals Professional Football League, and the Liga de Fútbol Americano Profesional, with the latter the only Mexican league. The UFL is considered a high-level league, and the rest are viewed as low-level leagues.
History
Early circuits (1890–1919)
The birth of semi-professional football can be traced back to the 1880s, when most sports clubs in America had a team playing football, and ostensibly played without paid players. In reality, most teams often found ways around that, and acquired the best players with the promise of jobs and trophies or watches to play against top regional clubs and colleges. While the practice of professional and semi-pro teams playing college and amateur teams was common in the 1880s and 1890s, most notably with the establishment of a coalition of teams that operated from 1886 to 1895 in the New York metropolitan area called the American Football Union, in the 20th century college and professional football began to diverge, and college-professional interplay effectively ended after the NCAA formed in 1906. During this time, the most prominent circuit was the Western Pennsylvania Professional Football Circuit.The first attempt to form a pro league was the National Football League of 1902, which, despite its name, was a Pennsylvania regional league, with two teams based in Philadelphia and the third from Pittsburgh. The next step came when promoter Tom O'Rourke established the World Series of Football, also in 1902. The series played indoors at New York City's Madison Square Garden and consisted of five teams: three from the state of New York, one from New Jersey, and another team called New York comprising two Philadelphia teams, the Athletics and Phillies. The 1903 series also featured the Franklin Athletic Club from Pennsylvania.
At the same time, the Massillon Tigers, the Columbus Panhandles, and the Canton Bulldogs, all from Ohio, started attracting much of the top professional football talent in the United States of America: Harry McChesney, Bob Shiring, the Nesser brothers, Blondy Wallace, Cub Buck, and later Jim Thorpe, and gave rise to the Ohio League. The league was actually a circuit— an informal and loose association of independent teams playing other local teams and competing for the Ohio Independent Championship. The group pioneered the concept of avoiding competition with college football games by playing games on Sundays, which was illegal in other states due to the existing blue laws. This eventually became the professional standard.
The Ohio League decade-long monopoly began to lose hold in the 1910s, with the formation of the New York Pro Football League, first league to use a playoff format, and other associations in the Midwest, particularly in Illinois. The rise in level of play resulted in barnstorming tours between the circuits, which laid the foundations for the first truly national major league: the American Professional Football Association in 1920, which later became the NFL.
The Golden Era
The first minor leagues period of prosperity or "heyday" started in the 1920s and lasted until the end of World War II. By the 1930s, football was not a fledgling enterprise, but pro football was, as even the National Football League had trouble attracting fans, and was located mostly in the northeastern quarter of the United States. In other parts of the country, several regional leagues tried their luck in the pro game, along with flourishing regional circuits of independent teams, recapturing the pro football roots. The era is also considered the best of all time, due to the quality of play, as there were only 250 players in the NFL, while the regional leagues could sometimes offer better pay and jobs, and offered black players opportunity to play during the period of 1933–1946, when they were excluded from all NFL teams.In 1934, the American Football League was the first true attempt to establish pro football in the American South and Southwest regions. The league was formed by the strongest independent teams in the region, including the Memphis Tigers, who claimed the national pro championship in 1929, after beating the NFL champion Green Bay Packers. The AFL had only one season of competition and folded after only the Memphis Tigers and Charlotte Bantams completed their seasons.
Another strong southern league was the Dixie League, which represented Mid Atlantic teams. The league was one of the most successful minor leagues in history, playing eight seasons in eleven years, while claiming to be the highest level minor football league of the era. Unlike most pro-football minor leagues, the Dixie League had a relative stable membership until the Pearl Harbor attack forced the league into hiatus. The league returned in 1946, but folded in 1947 after playing only one week.
The Dixie League's biggest counterpart was the American Association football league. The AA was formed by the nucleus of independent teams that played in the New York and New Jersey circuits, and was led by president Joe Rosentover. The league teams sought relationships with the NFL, and several teams, including the Newark Bears, Brooklyn Eagles, and Jersey City Giants, functioned as a farm system for the major NFL teams. The league allowed black players to participate, including the last African-American in the NFL in 1933, Joe Lillard. Most teams scheduled games against the independent Fritz Pollard's Harlem Brown Bombers. The league closed operations during World War II, and after a four-year hiatus, the AA was renamed the American Football League and expanded to include teams in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The league's demise was caused by the NFL severing ties with all minor league teams in 1948.
The last of the "Big Three Leagues" was the Pacific Coast Professional Football League, which started in 1940. The roots of pro football in the west are attributable to the Red Grange barnstorming tour with the Chicago Bears in 1926, as some short-lived leagues, including the 1926 Pacific Coast Professional Football League and 1934–1935 American Legion League, were formed. The PCPFL was formed thanks to the financial backbone of the sport in California, the Los Angeles Bulldogs, billed as the "best football team in existence outside the NFL", and the only prominent minor football league to operate during the war years. The league became home to the top African American football talents in the country, including Kenny Washington, Woody Strode, Ozzie Simmons, Mel Reid, and briefly Jackie Robinson during the NFL enforced color barrier. The league played its last season in 1948, two years after the NFL moved the Los Angeles Rams to Los Angeles. The Big Three reached an agreement with the NFL, and in 1946 formed the Association of Professional Football Leagues as a formal farm system with the league. The agreement lasted less than two years, after the NFL cancelled it altogether in 1948. The termination triggered the end of the era.
Other prominent leagues were the Anthracite League of Pennsylvania, the Eastern League of Professional Football based in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the Ohio Valley League, the Midwest Football League, and the Northwest War Industries League in Washington and Oregon. During the 1930s and 1940s, there were also strong independent circuits in Greater New York metropolitan area and the Northeast.