



Some of you may be aware that, a whole year ago now, before I ever posted about the NFL or CFL and after only a few posts on college football, I was blogging about the Alliance of American Football . I was so excited for the AAF to begin in the weeks leading up, but it translated to just two posts of ratings. If you’re on Discord with me, in the FredRank server or elsewhere, you may have seen my ratings already, but there’s more to talk about here.Much like the product of the AAF itself, these ratings almost feel unfinished in a sense. I’ve applied my new system of weighing game results by week, such that later results have a bigger impact on the ratings. Based on that, we can extrapolate where we think the teams would end up … but imagine if we’d done that in week 5, for example.We’d be in an entirely different spot! We’d have never seen the Apollos’ lone loss coming and the Legends would be riding the momentum from their only two wins.But it should be no surprise that the Orlando Apollos, the unofficial champions of the AAF, are also on top of my ratings. They won their first game by putting up 40 on the Legends, the only team to score that much in all eight weeks. The Arizona Hotshots are the only team to come close to their rating, which is unsurprising given the 22-17 Hotshots win in Orlando in Week 6.When the Atlanta Legends lost, as they usually did, they lost big. That’s the difference between the Hotshots winning in Orlando and the Legends coming out on top in Tempe in Week 4. The Hotshots won convincingly three times out of five and only lost close games. The Legends were blown out more often than not and only put up more than 20 points once, when they defeated pre-Johnny Manziel Memphis, also a 2-6 team, at home by 3.The Iron deserve special recognition for being the only non-Apollos team to have secured a playoff spot, yet they find themselves next-to-last in these ratings. The only team to play five home games should have had more to show for it. Visits to Arizona and Orlando closing out the schedule could have boosted their rating with decent showings, but we’ll never know now.It’s impossible for me to separate the projections from the results. I was projecting win-loss records before we saw a single AAF game that counted for anything. That’s why I’ve included my projected 10-game results in this table. I don’t have that same sentimental attachment to other leagues that folded in the middle of a season—namely the WFL and UFL in their respective final seasons—so I won’t be doing the same with those.It’s very much possible that things play out differently if allowed to. It’s possible that the Apollos drop one or both remaining games by sitting starters, having already clinched the top seed in the East. And what about a four-way tie in the West? That was in play until the very end and could have been a very interesting conundrum.With the weight in place toward later results, it might be confusing to see these win-loss trends and end up with stuff like the Iron (2-1 in their final three games) below the Fleet (0-3). Remember that these ratings are less about the black and white of winning or losing and more about the shades of gray that come in how close a game was.As I get further into this series, I’m going to be looking at leagues of varying sizes, as big as eighteen teams in a season and as small as four. A pattern should begin to emerge, and I want you all to pay attention to it. The bigger a league is, the less any single win-loss record will speak for itself.At first, I wasn’t looking forward to the new XFL the way I did with the AAF, but there’s just some things I must admit the latter messed up.The XFL got a better TV deal. They’ll be on Fox, ESPN and ABC almost every week they play. The AAF was relegated to CBS Sports Network or the Bleacher Report app every week after the first.The XFL has the nostalgia factor working for it. People remember it fondly as a wacky startup league that, prior to the AAF, was the quickest league of note to fold. Going twenty years between iterations also means there’s an entire generation of new football fans who were never aware of the original XFL’s issues (but that’s a different post).The XFL has better investment this time around. Vince McMahon is willing to spend even more of his own fortune to keep it afloat for at least a couple more years beyond 2020. The AAF, on the other hand, had investors who were not so generous, as well as at least one who used a massive cryptocurrency scam to fund his contribution.The XFL chose better markets. The smaller ones aren’t competing with the NBA for attention right now, and the bigger ones have the population to support both. Six of the AAF cities were smaller markets with an NBA team in place.And finally, the XFL was in no rush. The Alliance was announced two months after the new XFL, but its owners believed it needed to be the first to market in order to compete. Now we know that rushing things backfired.I loved the AAF and I’ll miss it. I’ll enjoy looking back on what it was. Just don’t expect me to miss out on the good football we have in its place.