Below is a NYTimes article that details a lot of the small time arena football leagues. I noticed it because they followed along with E. J. Nemeth, who was the QB for the Mariners before the league dissolved. Its amazing that these guys will literally pick up and move all over the country to be a part of these teams.

The only arena game I ever attended was the championship game they had last year when the Baltimore Mariners went undefeated. It was at 1st mariner two blocks from my apartment, really cheap, and a lot of fun. Though I think it was probably very different then your typical arena game. I heard there were 6,000 fans at that game while a normal arena game for those leagues is lucky to have a couple hundred. Also it was a close competitive game while most are blowouts.

The stuff they show on Friday nights on the NFL network are a league above the local stuff. I've never watched it myself, with the exception of the game honoring Kurt Warner and retiring his arena football jersey.

I don't know if this post really has a point, but insomnia plus nfl lockout means some superfluous posting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/sp...2&pagewanted=1

Staying in the Game on Football’s Fringe
By MIKE TANIER

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — The Lehigh Valley Steelhawks play football in a nearly empty college basketball arena. As players slam opponents onto a playing surface with all the protection of a patio carpet and crash into barely padded plywood walls, the few hundred fans blow plastic trumpets, ring cowbells and thump on seatbacks. The team’s general manager is also its announcer. End-of-quarter entertainment is a family of four playing musical chairs at midfield to a Beastie Boys song.

Welcome to football’s most minor of minor leagues, where crowds are tiny and paychecks are tinier, and where success on Saturday night is no guarantee of employment on Monday morning.

The Steelhawks play in the Indoor Football League, one of what their coach, Richard Britt, calls “the alphabet leagues.” In addition to the Indoor Football League, there are the Southern Indoor Football League, the Ultimate Indoor Football League, the Continental Indoor Football League and the American Professional Football League.

Leagues add and subtract franchises, merge and dissolve, quietly go dark for a year or more, then reappear. Teams from rival leagues battle for markets like Richmond, Va., which now has two competing teams jostling for fans, sites and players. All told, there are five stable minor indoor football leagues across the country, with 56 teams, give or take a few, hoping to last.

Unlike in the N.F.L., there are no lockouts or lawsuits over billions of dollars in these leagues, where players live huddle to huddle, game to game, bus ride to bus ride.

Football Vagabonds

Three hours before kickoff, Trenton Steel quarterback E. J. Nemeth slips off sandals and walks barefoot onto the turf at Sun National Bank Center in Trenton for warm-ups. Nemeth, a stocky 250-pounder with a three-day growth of stubble, sometimes tells reporters that he practices barefoot “to get a feel for the turf,” but he concedes that it’s “just something I started years ago, something kooky I do.”

Nemeth’s career typifies the vagabond life of a minor leaguer. A former New Jersey high school standout who played at two small colleges, Nemeth, 27, has quarterbacked indoor teams in Pennsylvania, Texas and Alaska. He played for four teams in one four-month stretch in 2008. He led the Baltimore Mariners to a 16-0 record and an American Indoor Football Association championship last year, only to see the team dissolve and the league cease operations.

He does it all for $150 a game, and a bonus for a win. By day, he works at a hay farm in Cranbury Township, N.J.; after lifting hay bales, seven-hour bus rides to towns like Erie, Pa., “are like a day off,” he said.

Minor leaguers like Nemeth are nomads. They assemble highlight films to send to coaches and general managers in cities like Allen, Tex., and Wenatchee, Wash. They network aggressively, then lobby for former teammates once they make a roster.

Some players, like Nemeth’s teammates Oderick Turner and Craig Heyward Jr., are sons of former N.F.L. players. But most have no name recognition and must attend team tryouts and regional combines, often at their own expense, in the hope of being noticed.

Like Nemeth, most players work day jobs. Steelhawks running back Isaiah Grier organizes youth camps in his hometown, Newark. Trenton Steel receiver Damon Harrison teaches history at a Newark public school. Steelhawks receiver Irani DeAraujo does not work during the season because he strives to be “the ultimate professional” about football; instead, he works overtime in the off-season, which just began, earning $13 an hour at a home for disabled adults.

To play in the indoor minor leagues is to put aside real job opportunities for a chance to keep competing. N.F.L. dreams are rare; for players at this level, the Arena Football League, the Canadian Football League and the United Football League are the major leagues.

“I got a taste of a championship last year. and I want to get another one,” Nemeth said.

Mirror Balls and Free Meals

The Trenton Steel cobbled together a team headquarters inside an old nightclub across the street from Sun National Bank Center. Office equipment is strewn across makeshift work spaces on a former dance floor, and players pick at the remains of a team lunch laid out on the service bar. The headquarters is dimly lighted; a mirror ball dangles motionless over staff members as they work.

General Manager Richard Lisk had only four months to field a team from scratch, leaving no time for office decoration. He busily promotes the team in the community when not overseeing day-to-day affairs. “I have to be at every street festival, every fair, every block party,” he said.

Lisk provides team lodging at a nearby hotel and scrounges to provide daily meals for the two dozen players: pub grub one day, Chick-fil-A the next. Lisk, whose background includes a stint as the general manager of the Arena Football League’s Philadelphia Soul and of a Trenton hockey team, is trying to forge a recognizable identity for the team; everything has a steel mill theme, right down to the rivet design on player uniforms.

The Lehigh Valley Steelhawks’ owner, Glenn Clark, also has ambitions: he hopes to move from the Lehigh University arena into a newly built minor league hockey arena in a few years. This season, Clark learned to start from nothing, buying a playing surface from a defunct Utah franchise and securing sponsorship for everything, including the footballs.

“We hope to make money next year,” he said. “We have a three-year plan.”

The Steel’s Southern Indoor Football League, which absorbed several teams from the American Indoor Football Association this year, does not enjoy the relative stability of the Steelhawks’ Indoor Football League.

A team in Lafayette, La., suspended operations days before the season started because it could not afford workers’ compensation insurance. Another, the Mobile Bay Tarpons in Alabama, shut down after players went several weeks without pay; local newspapers reported that the team’s owner left town and discontinued his cellphone service and that players paid their own way to one game.

Players and coaches for the Fayetteville Force in North Carolina staged a mutiny after missing paychecks in April; they were replaced by a semipro team, which promptly lost, 138-0, to the Erie Explosion.

With franchises going dark and games going unplayed, the S.I.F.L. may be a hard sell.

Fanatics, Fans and Friends

Lou Caramano stands near the tunnel behind the Trenton Steel goalposts wearing a yellow wig and flapping a yellow cape. Team colors are red and black, but that does not faze him as he exhorts the crowd. “These guys hustle,” he said, explaining his passion for the Steel. “They could beat the Philadelphia Soul.”

On the opposite end of the arena, the 61-year-old Jim Ramm proposes to Gina Perkinson during the first quarter of a Steel game. The team gives the couple engagement gifts of flowers and an autographed football. Ramm and Perkinson watch the game from an overstuffed couch reserved for V.I.P.’s, Ramm interrupting a discussion of his nuptial plans to scream for a touchdown.

“I like the indoor game,” Perkinson said, her bouquet by her side. “It’s faster paced.”

After games, fans mingle on the field with players who sign footballs and pose for photographs. Children play tag on the turf. Owners like the Steel’s Andrew Bondarowicz, whose company also owned the Fayetteville Force, and the Steelhawks’ Clark take the field beside their players, blurring the lines between player, fan and executives.

“When I take my family to the movies, it can cost about $100, and Tom Cruise isn’t going to come down from that screen and sign something for my kids the way E. J. Nemeth does,” said Lisk, the Trenton general manager.

All that is missing for fans is the guarantee that the team they fall in love with this year will still be in business next year.

“Every week is a make-or-break week,” the Steelhawks’ DeAraujo said of his career, but he might well have been speaking of his team, his league or minor league football itself.