Summer pro football development league to be formed

[WDLion]

Did you purposely ignore the comment about tradition? Minor league baseball has been around for 120 years. College was not developing major league ball players back then and no poor kid from the country was even considering it.

Everything starts somewhere.

 

[tboyer]

NFL teams should be allowed to sign kids out of high school, just like baseball teams do. It takes no longer to produce an NFL player (in fact, usually a lot less time) than it takes to produce a major league baseball player.

While they're training, the kids get a minor league salary. As part of their signing package, most of them get money set aside to pay for college if baseball doesn't pan out.

Minor league professional football would be awesome in a lot of small and medium sized cities that don't have major college football.

And it would do wonders to clean up the NCAA. You wouldn't have these programs that basically are built of players who don't belong in college and don't want to be in college, and are only pretending to be college students because the NCAA and NFL require it.

 

[tboyer]

Minor league baseball is a great deal financially for the clubs. Aside from the signing bonuses, minor league salaries are low -- and the coaches salaries are too. A whole minor league team costs less than one journeyman player.

Some of the NFL's best franchises -- Patriots and Steelers prime example -- succeed because they do a great job of grooming players over the long haul to fit their system. That is hard to do within the confines of a 45 man roster and a practice squad. Minor league football would be great for these teams because they would have years to train players for their system -- might even save them money vs. having to hire top free agents.

 

[kgilbert78]

Did you purposely ignore the comment about tradition? Minor league baseball has been around for 120 years. College was not developing major league ball players back then and no poor kid from the country was even considering it.

There's always been a handful of college-educated MLB players in the league, even back in the old days. But there were not a lot of scholarships for it. Still aren't in comparison with football.

 

[kgilbert78]

Minor league professional football would be awesome in a lot of small and medium sized cities that don't have major college football.

There are not a lot of these..... Most places in the US, I'll bet, are less than an hour or two's drive from a D-I program--except maybe out in sparsely populated locales like Montana. Or Potter County....