The Alliance of American Football will apparently meet the same fate as so many spring football leagues have, ending before the conclusion of the first season.
On Tuesday, multiple outlets reported the league would suspend all football operations later in the day, with the expectation that the league will fold not too long after. Tom Dundon, the owner of the Carolina Hurricanes who invested $250 million earlier this year to become the primary owner of the league, made the decision and will lose a significant amount of his investment in the process.
All @TheAAF football operations will be suspended in the next few hours, per source with knowledge of situation. League is not folding, yet. But it's heading that way.
— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) April 2, 2019
https://twitter.com/darrenrovell/status/1113120390073716736
Losing $70 million in two months is rather incredible, as is the seemingly rash decision to shutter the league (although, again, that’s not official just yet) simply because you don’t think the NFL is offering you enough support. It’s clear his demands to the NFL to help him out by providing players from NFL teams for development did not pan out as he hoped, unsurprisingly to most on the outside because what leverage did he have.
The league wanted to be a development league for the NFL, but to get the NFL and NFLPA to commit to providing resources and potentially lending players to the AAF, it needed to show it could actually develop players further than they would have done just in their NFL team programs.
