The Professional Spring Football League (PSFL) was an outdoor football league slated to begin in 1992. The league had a preview show on SportsChannel America in late 1991/early 1992, laying out the ten teams that would play. The league was founded by Vincent Sette, a computer sales executive. Rex Lardner, a television executive, was the commissioner.
As far as sports leagues folding before they actually began to play their first season, this league probably got the closest to actually starting the season than any other example, as each team had players already in camp and practicing, and rosters cut down to 60 players, before the plug was pulled. Some fairly high-proifle coaches had been announced, and a number of current or future notable Arena Football and NFL players were in the teams' training camps, including mid-90s Dolphins RB Bernie Parmalee, AFL QB Ben Bennett, AFL DS Durwood Roquemore, and AFL WR/DB Barry Wagner. Notre Dame QB Tony Rice, Tim Smith RB – Washington Redskins (200+ yards) in the Super Bowl and many others that played professional football.
The 1992 PSFL Championship Game, "The Red, White And Blue Bowl", was to have been played at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, July 5.
The folding of the league was announced on February 19, 1992, 10 days before the scheduled season opener. The league had over 7 million dollars in escrow from ticket sales as funds were not to be spent until the games were played and revenues were earned. This protected fans and sponsors from losses or failure, and ticketholder received full refunds. The PSFL tried to regroup for 1993 season, but again the start-up funding did not get secured and the league organization disbanded.
This league was the first sports LLC which has been the blueprint of several leagues since. (Most well-known is the WNBA). Rather than the league being set up as a non-profit organization which technically exists for the benefit of its for-profit franchises, the PSFL was one single corporation (the "entity" model of sports league organization) with limited partners operating the teams and pefroming many of the functions usually performed by team owners in the traditional model of North American professional sport organization. This eliminated weak financial teams as well as the potential for collusion as all players were contracted from the PSFL and then assigned to teams. The teams shut down all on the same day as all invoiced expenses were paid by the league headquarters on a budget system. The start-up funding to get to the first games did not show up for various reasons. It was responsible for many NFL changes in player relationships, stadium signage configurations, and marketing sponsorship innovations.
Two-point conversions were to be allowed and overtime was to be a modified sudden death, with each team being guaranteed a possession. The league did play a few exhibition games in Florida for the benefit of area police departments.
Read more about Professional Spring Football League: Teams
Famous quotes containing the words professional, spring, football and/or league:
“Never be intimidated when you deal with men. Curse, don’t cry.”
—Anonymous, U.S. professional woman. As quoted in Aspirations and Mentoring in an Academic Environment, ch. 4, by Mary Niles Maack and Joanne Passet (1994)
“When we reached the lake, about half past eight in the evening, it was still steadily raining, and harder than before; and, in that fresh, cool atmosphere, the hylodes were peeping and the toads ringing about the lake universally, as in the spring with us. It was as if the season had revolved backward two or three months, or I had arrived at the abode of perpetual spring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)
“I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best—it’s all they’ll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money—provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don’t need it.”
—Peter De Vries (b. 1910)