On Wednesday night in Coney Island, about 80 football players worked on their résumés in heavy rain in front of a small crowd on a field painted over a Class A baseball diamond.

The players for the Brooklyn Bolts and the Boston Brawlers, nearly all of whom had preseason or practice-squad experience in the N.F.L., braved the deluge in the brand-new Fall Experimental Football League in the hopes of climbing back to the sport’s top tier. For many of them, the Brooklyn crowd — stymied by the weather and the timing — was their smallest audience since Pop Warner.

“There’s things we’re having to endure that we haven’t experienced in a long time,” Brawlers quarterback Tajh Boyd, the 2012 Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year while at Clemson, said before boarding a bus for the trip back to Boston. He chose to give the F.X.F.L. a try after the Jets cut him in August.

The football landscape is littered with the remains of professional leagues come and gone: the United Football League, the United States Football League and the X.F.L. F.X.F.L. organizers acknowledged the challenge, but said the N.F.L. needed a minor league to help players with professional talent and nowhere to play.