Why can’t the NFL make a developmental league work?

The National Football League is the only one of the four major North American sports not to have a minor league proving ground. That could be changing by the end of the decade, according to a recent report by the Associated Press.

“There’s been discussions over the last couple years. I don’t know what direction it’s going, but I think we have a need for it,” said Fisher, who also serves as co-chairman of the NFL’s competition committee. “I think it would be beneficial from a young players’ standpoint. If you have to make an outside roster move to get somebody that’s in shape that you can evaluate on film.”

With NFL teams limited to carrying just 53 players on their active rosters, it’s tough for coaches to gauge those players on the fringes of rosters, the ones competing for practice squad spots or special teams roles.

With the NFL running preseason, regular season and playoff games from August through the beginning of February, any minor league would have to be played from roughly March-July. A schedule of 12 games plus playoffs would be conceivable in that timeframe.

This is not the first time the NFL has attempted to start up a developmental league. Since 1991, the league and private interest groups have invested in a series of startup leagues, none of which have been able to sustain long-term success.

In 1991, the NFL launched the World League of American Football, known as the WLAF or simply the World League. The brainchild of then-NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, it was designed as a spring league that would serve as a proving ground for players on the fringes of NFL rosters. It had 10 teams scattered throughout the Western Hemisphere: six in the US, three in Europe and one in Canada.

The format lasted just two seasons before shutting down for 1993 and 1994. While the European clubs experienced some early attendance success (the championship game in Wembley drew over 61,000 in 1991), the league never caught on in the US. The World League lost $7 million in its opening season, and TV ratings on ABC remained low throughout its run.

After a two-year suspension, the World League returned in 1995 with six teams all based in Europe. In 1998, the league was rebranded as NFL Europe (and again in 2006 as NFL Europa). Bolstered by a sponsorship from Reebok and American TV broadcasts by Fox Sports (who was also a co-owner), the league experienced mild success during a 12-year run.

With interest in the league dwindling, Roger Goodell finally pulled the plug on NFL Europe in 2007. By the end, it was estimated the NFL was losing approximately $30 million per season through the venture, according to Nesha Starcevic of the Washington Post.

The cost of running NFL Europe wasn’t cheap (each NFL team forked up about $500,000 during the final spring), but it wasn’t exactly breaking the bank for a league that generated roughly $6 billion in revenue that year. In the end, the issue wasn’t so much spending the money -- it was the fact that there wasn’t much of a return.

Outside of Warner and Delhomme, there weren’t many players that came out of Europe as NFL success stories. By the end, the league wasn’t even being used for development purposes by most teams. Franchises that allocated players to Europe received an exemption that allowed them to bring in additional players into training camp, so teams began sending players overseas for the sake of stockpiling extra bodies during the summer.

As ESPN’s Len Pasquarelli put it in 2007, “NFL Europa became a legal conduit for stashing players, one that finally outlived its usefulness.”

For a new league to succeed, it will need to provide enough developmental return to make the investment worth it.

In an age where medical science is revealing the dangers of football-sustained head trauma and the NFL is facing an onslaught of lawsuits over medical issues, adding more football might not be the answer.

Let’s imagine a player goes through a full season of spring developmental ball, running roughly from March through July. He then rejoins his NFL team for OTAs, training camp and preseason games before making the final roster. He’s just gone through about seven months of non-stop football. Then he has to start the NFL season.

Even if it were physically possible for a play to play football year-round, it seems unlikely the NFLPA would sanction that kind of schedule. For those players that managed to come out of a D-league and make it on with an NFL team, there would need to be some limit for how much football they could play in a calendar year, a pitch count of sorts.

Let’s not forget that a massive, well-organized developmental football league already exists. It cranks out hundreds of pro-quality players a year and does so without the NFL having to pay a dime. It’s called the NCAA.

While you’d never hear an NCAA official admit it, college football has long been the default farm system for the NFL. Why invest more money to start a new one?

The NFL might be preparing for the possibility of the NCAA unraveling amidst their own set of lawsuits with the Ed O’Bannon case and college players attempting to unionize to get medical insurance and pay. If the NCAA is going to begin paying football players, albeit cheaper than the NFL would, would it behoove the NFL to pay them on their own and develop them how they want, rather than trying to fix what flaws were not nurtured in college football?

Most experts seem to think that an NFL-associated league playing in the spring wouldn’t have too much of an issue getting a TV deal. The question is how much money would the television contract be worth, and how much would the players be paid? Ultimately, the NFL will have to weigh the costs of players, coaches, officials, promotions, stadium rights, staff and other various costs against revenue, and more importantly, player returns. If the league can make it work, perhaps another shot at a developmental league is on the way.