Commentary: NIFL daily buzz

by Jerry Hewitt
Published on April 28, 2006 under National Indoor Football League (NIFL)


Tennessee RiverSharks In Financial Trouble.

04/27/06 WRCB TV, Chattanooga, TN

The owner of the Montgomery Maulers and the Tennessee RiverSharks of the National Indoor Football League owes players from both teams back pay. Read more at http://www.wrcbtv.com/news/sports/index.cfm?sid=1100.

Yes I am tired of it

I have no comment on the above. I think there are no more comments that really express the situation in the NIFL anymore..

It's not that much fun to have more bad news to report on in the NIFL, than good news. So yes, I do get tired of it. If NIFL teams would start sending me more good news, I'd try to go that way as well. If nothing else I'd create more of a balance between good and bad.

There are good teams in this league, teams that would standout in any league, but unfortunately they get overshadowed by the actions of those with lesser ethics and just plain stupid business practices, some of which may border on fraud or even cross that border. Oh well, until it all changes, just have to go with the material the NIFL so freely supplies me with. Today at the end of things, I have included a weather forecast for NIFL markets.

Welcome OSC fans

For those of you reading this on OurSports Central, welcome!. This daily article is very informal and bounces around from topic to topic every day. I try to hit on what is the latest, but also whatever I feel like writing about.

I do want to thank OSC for including us on their site. OSC has proven to be the leader in miner league sports reporting. We that are in the same business only fall in the shadows of this leader. OK, enough of the kissing up, on to other things.

Taking a stand isn't easy, but it's right.

I have to applaud Coach Dan Whitsett for speaking out and taking a stand against much of what is going on in the NIFL. I need say no more than to urge fans to read what he said. Click here

Good in any league

In the APFL, there's a team called the Iowa Blackhawks. They sit in Council Bluffs, Iowa across the river from Omaha, Nebraska, home of the UIF team, the Beef. Now I'm aware of the fact that most leagues and even some fans look down at the APFL and their teams as sub par professional indoor football, but a couple do stand out, the Kansas Koyotes and the Iowa Blackhawks. An argument could be made for the Wichita Aviators as well, since they gave the Koyotes their first loss in three years earlier this season. Bui Blackhawks owner, Jake Hifferman, has done an outstanding job with his team. His team is as professional as any, in any league and he works tirelessly to improve. I see this first hand since I maintain their website. I get a constant stream of info that requires me to update their site often and I can see the work ethic of this owner. This week they will be adding a live vid cast of their game against the Wichita team, a first in the APFL. Check out the Iowa Blackhawks at www.iowablackhawks.com

NIFL, In the news

Since the article appeared yesterday in the Montgomery Advertiser on the firing of the players, I have seen the article or excerpts from it, pop in in newspapers from coast to coast. Even SportsIllustrated.Com picked it up. I have also seen it appear in newspapers in San Jose, Charlotte, Philadelphia, and Knoxville I even picked up one from ShortNews.com, out of Regensburg, Germany.

Isn't the Associated Press great and aren't newspapers even greater at publishing bad news. Now if the NIFL could only figure out how to get coverage of good news.

Tonight's action or lack of it

Not going to spend much time on tonight's match ups since none of the three will make anybody's game of the week and will hold little interest, unless you are a Cavalry, Rage, or Osceola fan. If you are a fan of any of those, you get to see your team put up big numbers and jump way up in the stats department.

I guess the best of the three tonight would be Arkansas at RiverCity, although I highly doubt it will be very competitive.

Both of the Arkansas wins have come on beating teams with no wins, their first, a narrow win over St. Joseph, that the newly named Cyclones could have easily won.

Montgomery at Osceola may turn into the joke of the year game with the Mauler team being replaced by whoever they can find that will fit into a uniform, after the Maulers owner fired the regular team.

Last we have St. Joseph against Wyoming. Wyoming is one of the toughest places in the NIFL to win, even good teams come away with a loss most of the time. The Cavalry have never scored a hundred points, home or away. They could easily do that against St. Joseph tonight.

Here's my prediction. The winning teams will score between 250 and 300 points combined. The losing teams will score under fifty combined. Arkansas may score the majority of the fifty, since I can easily see the other two scoring zero.

Don't blame me for telling it like it is, I didn't make the Arkansas, St. Joseph and Montgomery team records, which is an outstanding combined, 3-12, nor did I make the schedule that puts them up against teams with a combined record of 11-6, and on the same night.

Another red flag, another fire

Not going to mention any names here, but on May 24th one NIFL team will get it's day in court. Seems there is at least one team willing to stand up against the NIFL and take it to court over some of its business practices. Although the filing is a matter of public record, I'm still staying quiet on which team until I have permission to make it public or see it in print somewhere.

It's not that uncommon for a team to file a suit against their league. In this case though, it does send another signal that communication between the league and its teams is bad, if not non existent. It also says that at least one team is not on the same page as the league. If this were all that was happening in the NIFL of a negative nature, it wouldn't be a big deal, but combined with everything else, just another symptom of major problems in the six year old league.

More from the competition

Some of this I publish so fans can see that the NIFL is not the only league with problems. The AIFL has taken over their second team this season. The owner of the Florence franchise cited health reasons as the reason he turned the team back over to the league. The team has been averaging around 1500 per game. Remember the NIFL was in Florence once and bad attendance was the name of the game then as well. Guess the AIFL wasn't paying attention to the history when they decided to put a team back in there.

Road show

The Drillers Road Krew, DRK, take their show on the road again this week according to one of their members. Expect the best traveling fan show in the NIFL to show up at the Katy, Big Sky game. All that noise you hear, will be that small group out yelling the rest of the fans at the game. They don't just follow the Drillers, but Katy and whoever else may be playing that has a Texas brand on them, even outside of the NIFL. This group has traveled to games throughout Texas and Louisiana making them our pick for indoor football fans of the decade! BTW, at least one venue has banned the DRK noise makers, considers them weapons.

Arkansas next?

The River Sharks are LaMunyon other team. In the headline at the top of this article my suspicions are confirmed about the Maulers sister team also being in trouble..I took this excerpt from the video on one of the Montgomery Advertisers spots on the Mauler situation.

Quote from Chris Elrod (Sales/Marketing) of the Tennessee River Sharks, speaking to the fired members of the Maulers about their back pay:

"Chances are you're probably not going to see anything unless somebody buys this team now... I'm tired of seeing her (Maulers and River Sharks owner Jamie Lamunyon) do it. I know how she's floating checks back and forth using the wrong account number and messed up checks. Let's just be real candid and honest for a minute. It (Maulers getting paid) is probably not going to happen."

This tells me that we should probably put the fire watch symbol in Chattanooga, but we'll wait. But gee golly gosh Batman, the Penguin is more ethical than some owners in miner league sports.

And yes,I cheated and copied the quote from a post on Our Sports Central. So what, I'm lazy and I admit it!

Rapid City, a lesson here

We have two out of town owners and I suspect they were recruited by the NIFL to invest in the Aces. One from Florida and the other from Texas. I've been told the one from Texas claimed ownership, but was never on the LLC. He seems to have been the front man doing all the talking, including a press conference held day before yesterday. He is rumored to have now gone to work for the Arkansas Stars. If that is true, are the Stars going to end up on our fire watch?

But I had a point to make here, so I'll make it. Out of town ownership as a rule rarely works. They have no ties to the community, no other interests to hold them there. No real reason to hang in there if things go bad, just pack up and leave the mess behind. Local ownership is always best.

Fire watch

I've updated the fire map to include the home of the NIFL in Louisiana and the Tennessee River Sharks. I had forgot about the not in good standing with the state because of not filing a financial report. That's a red flag and should be considered a hot spot of trouble. Dayton appears to have been more of the coaching change with a few players upset over losing their coach situation than any real problem, but not 100% sure there isn't more just under the surface there. The low attendance numbers could signal more problems, so we'll leave them on the fire map for now. If you add up the markets on our fire watch, leave off Dayton, add Tennessee and the one we won't give the location of, you have seven hot spots. That's almost a third of NIFL teams with one kind of major problem or another.

Weather forecast

Official NIFL weather report and fire control updates. NIFL fire crews are hard at work trying to contain some of the fires, while they are just letting some burn themselves out. In some areas, local fire crews have been left on their own to battle the blazes. Reports from our watch towers are no new sightings, but the weather forecast includes a 90% chance of thunderstorms over the next eleven weeks. Additional fire crews have been put on alert that their services could be needed at a moments notice and should be prepared to go anywhere in the NIFL forest. As always, we have our own spotters that will be on the front lines covering the disasters as they happen.

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National Indoor Football League Stories from April 28, 2006


The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer(s), and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts or opinions of OurSports Central or its staff.


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