Charlie Ebersol, Alliance of American Football founder, is bullish on Memphis

Skeptical about the new pro football team in Memphis?

I’ve been a little skeptical, too. But then I caught up with Charlie Ebersol — the son of long-time television executive Dick Ebersol, and one of the co-founders of the Alliance of American Football along with Hall of Famer Bill Polian — and he said a lot of smart things. Here are excerpts from that interview.

Q: Why Memphis?

A: About two years ago when we started doing this and we started white-boarding a list of city names, I would say maybe the third name that went up on the list was Memphis, for a variety of reasons. One, historically it’s done incredibly well as an individual city during the spring football attempts, and second of all, it’s one of the top recruiting cities in the United States for football. And beyond all that, I was married in Tennessee last year and I felt a very burning desire to come back to the state and spend quality time there.

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Q: I might be even more impressed if you had honeymooned in Memphis.

A: Man, I would have. We got married in Knoxville and spent time throughout the whole state before we left for our honeymoon. Tennessee is now in my heart.

Q: Can we assume that one of the regional schools the team will draw players from is the University of Tennessee? Along with the University of Memphis?

A: I think that would be a pretty safe assumption.

Q: Memphis has a history of success with spring football leagues, but the leagues themselves don’t have a history of success. Why is this different?

A: A couple reasons. For the first time in recent history you're going to see a league that isn’t predicated on a huge media deal. So in the past, you look at the history of the two attempts that really had a shot at working and they both got killed because their television partner a) had a short-term deal, whereas we have a long term deal, and b) were not built around fan interaction. What you’ll see is that we are putting the power in the fans’ hands. Had it been in the fans’ hands 17 or 18 years ago, in the previous iteration of the spring league, the league would still be around. They were averaging 20-25,0000 fans a game, which is an enormous number relative to what all other sports do.

Q: If the league is not predicated on a huge media deal — although you do have a deal with CBS — what will make or break the league over the long haul?

A: The "long haul” is the key part of that question because the other problem with these previous attempts is that they were funded for a year or a couple months and that ultimately was the problem. You have to be going into something like this with a five-to-seven year business plan and fund it accordingly. ... Our investors, our venture-capital investors, our institutional investors, these are all people that really want to see reach as much as they want to see immediate returns. Because long-term business ventures are predicated on reaching as many people as possible. So you look at who our television partner is, it’s America’s most-watched network for the better part of two decades. And you look at what our digital-platform strategy is, it’s about giving fans what they’ve been asking for, for a long time. Things like integrated fantasy and a way to communicate with your friends while you’re playing so that it can be a more fun experience than the traditional sports broadcast has been.

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Q: What does that mean?

A: One of the reasons we called the league “The Alliance” is to break down the barriers between the players and the fans so they have a more integrated experience. So, to that extent, a player, when they get selected to a fantasy team, they’ll get bonused. So they’re incentivized to want to experience with the fans and be a part of it. And throughout the game, the fans can opt into the players. You’ll see over the next couple months as we roll out the prototype and let people play around with it, it’s really the first time the fan is fully empowered during the game to win and lose with all of the players, as opposed to the players they chose in the hours, weeks or months before the game is played.

Q: When will we know the identify of the eight teams?

A: In a matter of weeks. Once all the cities are announced, we’ll come back to the cities to announce what the name is.

Q: You haven’t announced which teams will have territorial rights to which universities. What is that process like?

A: I’ve seen several versions of it in the last couple weeks. It turns out that in a future life Bill Polian is hoping that Russell Crowe will play him in "A Beautiful Mind II" because he has created a mathematical system to how you award points to each university, which then applies to the various teams. You’ll definitely see the obvious ones — and you’ve already named a couple that are obvious for the Memphis team — but it’s an incredibly complex system.

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Q: What about salaries?

A: Every player in the league will make a base salary of around $50,000. Every single player. But then we structure bonuses around a couple different things. Win bonuses, obviously, if your team wins, you get a bonus. There’s statistical bonuses based on preset thresholds, so if you meet a certain statistical threshold you’ll get a bonus. The big thing — and again, we’ll roll this out over the next couple months to show how this works — but the big thing is fan engagement bonuses. ... We want the fans to think they have some say, even if it’s just financial, in driving the players' decision-making and how they decide to represent themselves to the larger community. Hopefully, that’s going to create a much tighter bond between players and their fans.

Q: You did a documentary on the XFL. Your father was co-founder of the XFL with Vince McMahon. McMahon is starting another spring football league. Is there some family schism we should know about?

A: My father and Vince created the XFL together. These are family friends. The Alliance of American football is something that we’ve been working on for a long time. ... If there’s one thing I learned in making the film it was that you have to empower the fans to be the decision makers. If you look at what the Memphis team did in 2001 in terms of ticket sales and engagement and how much the market embraced the experience, you recognize that there was something there. The flip side is, the need for high-quality football is paramount. When you look at the executives we’ve been announcing, the league executives, the team executives, the scouting executives that we’ve already started to put together, and then you look at the head coaches, the Spurriers and the Childresses and the Singletaries, what we’re doing — and we’re doing it very methodically — is showing people that our commitment to quality is the highest thing. Ultimately, marketing will be very important but it can’t start as a marketing stunt, it has to start as quality football.

Q: There was more initial buzz for the XFL in Memphis than there is for this team. But then the XFL fell off a cliff.

A: New Coke made a lot of noise but I don’t think a lot of people are drinking New Coke any more. Quality lasts forever. You think about the products you take home. You go to the farm, you’re driving a John Deere. ... I’m well-funded, I have a great television partner, I have a five-to-seven year plan. I am going to take this really slow. And I’ve picked cities specially because of their engagement with professional sports. What you guys have done in Memphis over the last 10 years is extraordinary. You have built a fan base for three different sports leagues in a really meaningful way and it’s been a long-term commitment, and ultimately, that’s what I’m looking for in our cities. You want to be in markets that are going to embrace you for a long period of time, that are going to embrace you through the ups and downs. And I’m a big believer that Memphis is capable and interested in doing something like that and, based on early ticket engagement, it seems like the city is very excited.

Q: You’re not worried the market has become too crowded?

A: It’s the other way around. For the last two years, I have become as much a stats consumer as anybody else. One of the things I look at is the expansion and contraction of sports demographics. And you look at the cities that have had the most success supporting multiple sports teams, it’s actually a build process. People get accustomed to the idea of going to buildings and stadiums and embracing a professional team or college team. The other thing is, Memphis is a really big football town. Take the Tigers out of it for a minute, and look at what the recruitment is, look at what the high school engagement is, look at what the Pee Wee engagement is. We look at that and we say, “OK, this is a space where they are being underserved in the football marketplace.” Because when you look at the engagement around football, football is six times the size of the next four closest sports combined. You add the next four sports average per-game ratings together, you multiply it by six, and you’re at the average rating of a regular-season NFL football game. This was not at any level an accident that we chose the cities we chose. We are betting big on what we believe is relatively sound math.

Q: What can you tell me about ticket prices?

A: The one commitment I can make to you is that we will have very, very high quality $35 tickets in every stadium — between the 20 yard lines and in the first 25 rows of the stadium — because we do want this to be something where the real fans get to sit up close and enjoy the game.