Interview with Elway and Wasserman

February 12, 2003 - Arena Football League (1987-2008) (AFL I) News Release

I'm going to just ask each a question, then we'll open it up for questions from the floor.

John, you have two games under your belt now. What is it like to watch the game as a front-office person from the stands as opposed to as a player?

JOHN ELWAY: Well, it's definitely quite a bit different. Anytime you're used to touching the ball, having a lot to do with the outcome of a football game, especially once the game starts, that's what I'm used to, now to have control over everything outside the lines is nice, but to have no control in the lines is frustrating, especially with what's happened to us the first couple weeks.

It's tough. It's a heck of a lot easier waking up on Monday mornings now.

CHRIS McCLOSKEY: Casey, your team last year made the playoffs. You're off to a 2-0 start with a legendary win over the defending champions. What's the momentum like for your team?

CASEY WASSERMAN: It's great. Obviously we had a rough go of it the first couple years, started to get some momentum last year. It's carried through this year.

Like any sport in any league, building an expansion franchise is difficult, and frankly it's taken us four years to get to this point. But we're happy about it and we hope we keep it going. It's a long season.

CHRIS McCLOSKEY: Let's take questions from the media.

Q. John, what got you involved in the AFL as an owner?

JOHN ELWAY: We'd actually been looking at it for a couple years. Mr. Kroenke just bought the Avalanche. He came and asked me at some point in time would I be interested in looking at an arena league team. So that's really kind of how the partnership came together.

We've actually been looking at it for a couple years now. I think I went to many games, talked to Casey about it, got his thoughts about it, talked to several people within the league. It was a league that had been around for 16 years. It survived and hung on longer than any other league outside the Top 4.

We looked at it and said, "What makes this league where it is?" Number one, it's got a great product, but it was also underexposed. Once NBC came on board, with the exposure it needed to get to the next level, if it did that, it had a chance to be real successful. That was the bottom line, the partnership with NBC, and also the improvement of the ownership group within the league, kind of the outlook for the league, where they think they can go in the future.

Q. Do you remember your first exposure to the arena league?

JOHN ELWAY: I'd run across it a couple times on TV but did not know a whole lot about it. Never seen one live until we got interested in bringing one here to Denver.

Q. What was your impression when you saw the live game?

JOHN ELWAY: I enjoyed it. It's a fun game. It's a fast game. Obviously, it's a different game. Having gone through this the first year, there's a lot of different nuances with this game than there is the stadium-played game. I'm still learning those. It's fast. It's entertaining. People in Denver seem to really enjoy it.

Q. Casey, as a guy who has been through the growing pains of expansion, looks like you guys are turning the corner, when you look at this Colorado team, how would you assess what they've been able to do in a short period of time throwing together a team?

CASEY WASSERMAN: They've put together a very good football team. There's no doubt that the Colorado Crush are frankly a better football team than we were in either of our first two years, and probably on par with the kind of team we were last year.

They are going through the growing pains of becoming a team. They've got a lot of good players. I promise you by the end of the season they're going to be playing like a team who is starting to learn each other and the nuances of how each other plays and how they react to situations, along with Coach Beers getting more ingrained into the league. All those things are going to lead the team to be very good throughout this year.

They are a way better football team than we were the first two years.

Q. John, just wondering about the process of trying to build a team. Was it as difficult as you thought it would be, more difficult? How did it rate?

JOHN ELWAY: Well, I mean, sitting here 0-2, it's definitely more difficult than I thought. I think we have a good football team. I think going through the expansion draft, then with our head coach, Bob Beers, him having been a scout for seven years, knowing where the players are out there, then having two coaches that were in NFL Europe, they were able to help us out quite a bit.

I think the talent's there. I think putting 24 guys together, getting them playing all on the same page when they've never played together has been the toughest thing.

Q. Do you handle all the personnel matters? What is your role exactly?

JOHN ELWAY: I'm involved in the football side, practice. I'm at every practice. But mainly on the business side, you know, going through the bigger things and getting this whole thing set up.

But I'm definitely heavily involved (inaudible).

Q. Do you have anything to do with game plans at all?

JOHN ELWAY: No, no. They leave that to coaches. Mike Perez, our offensive coordinator, played in the league for about seven years. He's really done a good job. So, no, I stay away from that.

Q. Can you tell me what kind of a mindset change do you go through after being on the field for so long. As an owner, what do you find keeps you going?

JOHN ELWAY: Obviously, I think a win would get me going. I think that's the biggest thing. I think no matter what, as a competitor, the wins and losses are the things that matter the most.

I mean, I find myself taking these losses just as bad as I took them when I was playing. Hopefully we can win a football game here soon and I can enjoy the fun of winning a game.

But that's the bottom line. Even though my role is different, it still comes down to wins and losses.

Q. John, can you talk about your transition that life after the NFL, whether owning an AFL quenches the competitive nature you have in you?

JOHN ELWAY: I think it's always tough when you go from the NFL out to life after athletics, to replace that competitive feelings. You can really never replace the competitive feelings you have from playing every Sunday in the NFL. I know that will never be replaced.

I think if there's anything that can get close to it, it's this. I think that's one thing that lured me to it, is to be getting that test every Sunday, being competitive and rooting for somebody. It helped with fulfilling the need to compete.

Q. John, with the holiday coming up, Valentine's Day, I was wondering if you could express if you recall a time when you fell in love with sports in general? Was there a particular time you knew that sports was what you wanted to get involved in?

JOHN ELWAY: You know, I think I was always -- from the time that I can remember, I always wanted to be involved in sports. My father was a football coach, so I was around it from the first days I can remember. That was something I fell in love with from the very get-go, was sports.

Back when I was young, we didn't have all the different options that kids have now. Sports was really, as a kid, the one thing you could do and have fun doing. I think since I was really -- I've always been that way.

Q. Casey, in regards to the news of the NFL, the rumors around that, how the Avengers is preparing you for that voyage? Also your success with the Avengers this year.

CASEY WASSERMAN: The only way to learn how to run a football team, or an NFL team, the only way to do it is by doing it. There's no school you can go to. There's no business class. There's no anything to prepare you for putting a football organization together, whether it's naming a team or hiring a coach or firing a coach or selling tickets or all the things that are entailed that I've now been doing for five years with the Avengers in LA.

After four years, we're starting to have some success that we can really feel, see and measure. That experience, frankly, is what would give me confidence to endeavor into an NFL team and feel reasonably confident that I could succeed.

You know, regardless of anything else, when Woody Johnson bought the Jets, he didn't know how to run a football team, he just bought the Jets. From that perspective, I would have a leg up I think on a lot of people who enter the NFL because I would have that experience.

The success we're having this year has been great. Believe me, we've struggled on the field for a couple years. We finally turned the corner last year. We've had our ups and downs off the field. We're starting to get a lot of traction this year. It's nice they're all happening at the same time.

But, you know, we wake up every day trying to work a little bit harder than the day before. We know as quickly as it can come, it can go.

Q. The attendance that you have had this year, the success, do you see that as a signal that LA is starving for professional football and continues to show that with arena football?

CASEY WASSERMAN: On one level, certainly. There's a lot of football fans in LA. You can also validate that by 90,000 people watching the USC-UCLA football game or 12,000 people for a high school football game, which happens in LA.

More appropriate to the AFL, I think it's showing that the AFL is starting to reach a critical mass. Frankly, with NBC and with owners like John Elway who are selling out games, are kind enough to offer their time to help promote the league, where it's really valuable, this league is starting to break through. We're starting to prove the theory, which we've all believed, that our challenge is always getting people to learn about the league, not getting people to like the league. We know people love the sport, love the league, are passionate about the product We just need more and more of them to get aware. That's finally happening.

Q. Can you talk about the impressions of John and what does his involvement in ownership mean for the AFL?

CASEY WASSERMAN: The first time John came to Los Angeles, we sat for two or three hours. It was clear that this was not an athlete doing this for fun. He was serious both on the business side and the football side. He wanted to know the details of everything.

So from the first moment I met him, besides having been a fan of John Elway, I was totally impressed by his approach and attitude and the respect, frankly, that he had for the game of arena football.

Seeing it come to fruition, I know they've had a couple tough losses, but they have a good football team. Off the field, they are today the most successful franchise in the Arena Football League. They are selling out games week in and week out. They are driving incredible television numbers. They have an unbelievable level of awareness. I promise you at the end of this year, you know, it's not going to surprise me to see the team in the playoffs.

Q. Having spent the past four or five years doing this, what have you found to be the most critical element in putting together a successful AFL team?

CASEY WASSERMAN: I actually harken back to a conversation I had with the commissioner when we first started: As an expansion team, the first year you're just trying to find who are the guys you like, who are the guys on your team you don't like, trying to get a feel for the situation.

The second year you start to release some of the guys who didn't make it and were kind of the bad character guys, and you bring in -- you start to bring in some more guys around your core.

By the third year, you really start to hit your stride.

Frankly, while I tried to argue with the commissioner saying we could do it in one year, it's exactly what happened. We have over the course of three years, now four years, developed a core group of players who we can rely on week in and week out, surrounded them with some younger guys who can learn from them, and have built a good team.

Let me tell you, the Colorado Crush are starting at a much higher level for a lot of reasons, but at a much higher level than the Avengers did when we started. Their three years may be 12 weeks of a season, but they're going to go through those some issues and go through those same mechanisms, it just may happen a little more quickly for them.

Q. John, talk about hearing those comments, an owner who has been there, done that, he's looking at your franchise saying there's a chance you can get to the playoff level faster than any other team coming into the league.

JOHN ELWAY: That's definitely our goal. This is something new to me, pretty new to everybody in the organization. You always set your goals high, your expectations are always high with the idea that it would be great for us if we could make the playoffs.

We're not looking at being an expansion team as something that we're looking at as an excuse, but we want to do the best we can and try to win football games. We also know, as Casey has said, it takes a while to put everything together. But we're going to do the best we can to put it all together this year.

CHRIS McCLOSKEY: Thank you, everybody. Thank you, John. Thank you, Casey. Check back with us next week for next week's AFL conference call.

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