Fox2-Detroit: Football is back with The Spring League

[4th&long]

Football is back with The Spring League on FOX 2

Fox should have all affiliates do this...

https://www.fox2detroit.com/video/933061

>>The Spring League is a premier professional football development league that features some of the brightest up-and-coming prospects in football. The majority of players who participate in The Spring League have spent time on an NFL active, practice, or pre-season roster. You can catch games Saturday afternoons this spring, on Fox 2.<<

[Firecop]

Talk about an overly cautious approach; they are kind of missing the boat here.

[4th&long]

Talk about an overly cautious approach; they are kind of missing the boat here.

FireCop... not sure what you mean - can you elaborate?

[Firecop]

What I meant was that Fox and the TSL really seem to be on something here and they should be shouting it from the rafters. I don't believe that they are promoting the league enough given the unique and golden opportunity that they find themselves in. The TSL could pull of everything that the AAF and XFL couldn't - start small & play ball!

[laxtreme56]

I think some of you are overplaying this Fox deal. This is no different than NBC's brief foray into NLL, Monster Truck Racing, and most of the AFL 2.0 years on ESPN/2. AKA, glorified infomercials. Fox knows the demos and ratings aren't going to be worth the effort of promoting. Hence they have their B team announcers off location do play by play of the games with the same handful of commercials in between breaks. It may cost $125k for Fox to produce these games and in return make $150k in ad revenue. This is the definition of no risk, low reward payoff for Fox, the TSL is essentilaly a penny stock to them.

[Firecop]

While I certainly wont argue with your spot-on description of the current situation, we'll have to agree to disagree. I think the potential is there for TSL and Fox to possibly make something significant happen. Already the TSL is talking about expanding and as you said, Fox isn't into big numbers here. There is nowhere to go, literally, but up... and when you are the only game in town...

Time will certainly tell but I do think that their business model (for both TSL & Fox) might really turn into something. It is just nice to be able to watch true American style football and not indoor football, during the Spring. If nothing else, it is a nice distraction from the winding down COVID mess and political chaos.

[4th&long]

The TSL approach is stay within budget .... and keep the budget lean. We can like it or not but that's what it is. Both the XFL and AAF were high cost no expense was too high leagues.
VM over reacted and simply could have scaled back in a covid environment but got scared by the fear which is now gone. But VM had a high cost based league and at the time he wasn't taking chances. All OL wanted to do was keep cost in place with no revenue, if he had moved immediately to restructure until it made sense things may have been different.
As far as AAF - Ebersol scammed everyone with his purported funding and spent like he had it... but never did, DOA.

Enter the TSL - FOX sees it as something they can control and use as needed to fill time, while taking a lost cost approach. The TSL is built the same and neither are in jeopardy of folding financially - that brings stability. TSL is flexible and FOX needs that.

No one is over reacting to the TSL on FOX/FS1-2 - its a major accomplishment and TSL is getting money. Let's see if ratings (FOX) are comparable to MLS at a fraction of the cost. While the Wk 1 cable ratings were lower then initially hoped 2/3 averaged over 100k viewers and that beats most FS1 shows, and its 3hours. - time will tell going forward. And what FOX/TSL's goals aren't opaque to us.