Death of the Alliance of American Football

[Gothamite]

Well gosh, that's odd.

[dfwabel]

15 minutes ago, Gothamite said:

Well gosh, that's odd.

What hasn't been with this?

 

The all-promising app only started it's actual development last November.

[CaliforniaGlowin]

Didn't Dumdum know he was going to lose money on this?  That shouldn't be a surprise, even fans know that.  Or was it just the amount of money he lost that spooked him? 

 

He's trying to avoid liability by saying he was not officially controlling owner, yet if the league was successful he'd probably take credit for it and be proud of it.

[MJWalker45]

2 hours ago, CaliforniaGlowin said:

Didn't Dumdum know he was going to lose money on this?  That shouldn't be a surprise, even fans know that.  Or was it just the amount of money he lost that spooked him? 

 

He's trying to avoid liability by saying he was not officially controlling owner, yet if the league was successful he'd probably take credit for it and be proud of it.

There's taking a loss upfront, and there's looking 3 years down the road and not seeing improvement.  If the XFL managed to lock up major networks for 2020, the AAF would have been paying NFL Network,  Bleacher Report or someone else to show games. With Ebersol trying to get a merger prior to the season starting, he knew he was broke and needed the money he was expecting from Dundon. The fact people were surprised to see their expense reports rerouted to another city tells me Ebersol was creating his own Fyre Festival level debacle.

[CaliforniaGlowin]

Could it be he learned about these shady dealings and then pulled out?  

[dfwabel]

Here's the filing with a partial list of those owed

http://www.techresource.group/files/aaf7.pdf

[Gothamite]

1 hour ago, CaliforniaGlowin said:

Could it be he learned about these shady dealings and then pulled out?  

 

If he didn’t bother to check into them before investing, and if they didn’t bother to make him sign a contract before having over the keys to the league, then they deserve each other.  Grifters, liars, and scumbags all. 

[dfwabel]

In going through the creditors, they didn't pay ANYBODY for services rendered.

 

SkyCam is owed nearly $1M...

Ebersol's original production company is owed nearly $200K...

An Atlanta printing company is owed $25K...

Cutters Gloves is owed $49K...

Mariucci was owed $40K, and it seems like the announcer freelance fee was $20K/game as Shaun O'Hara is due $100 grand...

Sneaky Big Productions, where they shot the pre, post and halftime shows is due over $740K...

OAI, who made the sideline banners for all teams is due nearly $800 large.

 

God D@mn this is a hot mess, but by looking at the amount of sales tax owed in the 8 states where they had teams, we might be able to estimate their gameday revenues (or lack of them).

 

 

[nickp91]

 true crime podcast series, sports podcast series, book, and documentary about the Alliance of American Football

[Cosmic]

I'd be impressed at this point if they actually DID pay for anything besides the salaries of people they needed to physically show up.

[dfwabel]

4 hours ago, Cosmic said:

I'd be impressed at this point if they actually DID pay for anything besides the salaries of people they needed to physically show up.

Well, here's their Birmingham grift in a nutshell:

Quote

The filings show the league owes $38,657 to the city of Birmingham and $11,248 to Birmingham Parks and Recreation. To Jim 'N Nicks, the popular barbecue joint, the league owes $12,718.

 

More than $63,000 to Birmingham-area hotels including Hilton Perimeter Park, Home 2 Suites, Courtyard Downtown and the Hilton Garden Inn.

 

The largest line of debt goes to Yar-Tay Company, which provides concessions services. The league owes that company $125,443.

 

Other Birmingham media and print companies and other businesses were also listed. Here are those companies and the amounts owed listed:

    Alabama Graphics - $16,853
    Alabama Media Group - $4,500
    Birmingham Business Journal - $6,500
    Bruno Events - $31,540
    Raycom Media - $8,105.
    Robertson and Associates - $18,000
    Southern Foodservice Management - $3,853
    Southland Electric Company - $355
    Summit Media - $37,663
    Fastsigns/Accuprint - $1,378
    Vulcan Park and Museum - $100
    WBRC - $8,470
    Wiley Graphics - $3,572
    Vanguard Cleaning - $6,431
    Wright Fitness Inc. - $3,390

 

[Sodboy13]

"Screw everybody, we'll just screw everybody."

[GDAWG]

So who would have to pay? Ebersol or Dundon?

[dfwabel]

6 hours ago, GDAWG said:

So who would have to pay? Ebersol or Dundon?

Likely neither.

The two "Ls" in LLC, stand for "Limited Liability" for a reason. Their personal assets are protected under most circumstances. Plus, there's no assets to be distributed between them (or at least appears to be)

[Sec19Row53]

7 hours ago, dfwabel said:

Likely neither. [in answer to the question of who would have to pay, Ebersol or Dundon]

 

and thus why BOTH deserve slings and arrows. This isn't a case of one or the other being the good guy or the bad guy. This was a total BS job where funding never existed in the real world, as evidenced by who didn't get paid (everyone).

[dfwabel]

Vendors are now talking.  Get this:

 

Excerpt:

Quote

With the AAF bleeding millions each and every week it remained in existence, per USA Today, Dundon deemed it necessary to scrimp and save wherever possible including on the margins. So vendors—companies that supplied locker room supplies, traveling equipment and more—were approached hat in hand and offered less than the full amount owed by the AAF.

 

While AAF officials served as the point of contact, two sources involved with the negotiations told Front Office Sports that the debt-clearing plan was conceived and ordered by Dundon’s financial team. If that meant exploiting AAF officials’ pre-existing relationships with vendors and playing on the faith placed in the league, so be it. As one former AAF official told Front Office Sports, it was “just a :censored: situation.”

 

Some of the companies did take the lowball offers, but others refused to accept less, insisting on full payment. It didn’t matter. Both paths led to vendors getting stiffed by the AAF. Dundon’s financial team kept stalling, promising the equivalent of “the check’s in the mail,” right up until the moment when the AAF closed its doors for good.

 

 

 

Quote

Otis Jackoboice is the 49-year-old owner of Olympic Case Company, a Tampa, Florida-based supplier of custom cases, trunks and workboxes. In November, he was contacted by the AAF. The league ended up ordering $118,537.79 in goods from Olympic Case. Reached by phone, Jackoboice said initially he was “thrilled.”

 

The first sign of significant trouble came in March, when Jackoboice received a call from Beacham. The equipment head offered him $90,000 in compensation. At first, Jackboice assumed this lump sum would be followed by a payment plan and timeline in which the AAF would cover the remaining balance. It soon became apparent that this was all that would be coming his way.The league was asking him to gift them $28,000.

 

So Jackoboice moved his complaints up the food chain. Multiple emails were sent and phone calls placed to Farrell, who did not respond.  (Via text message, Farrell told Front Office Sports: “Sorry, I can’t talk right now.” He did not respond to further requests for comment.) As he waited for answers, Jackoboice began speaking with other vendors. It’s a fairly close-knit world, he said. Vendors compare notes, and when one snags a contract, word spreads fairly quickly. In this instance, they’d been fed similar reassurances with scant few results. To them, it all seemed reminiscent of a recent and infamous case of widespread fraud.

 

4

 

And lastly this...

Quote

What neither vendor knew was this: The debt-reduction plan did not originate with Beacham, Farrell nor any other pre-Dundon AAF official they were dealing with, according to Marc Jacobson, the former AAF head of brands.

 

Reached by phone, Jacobson told Front Office Sports that the AAF’s finances were already strained by the time Dundon stepped in as majority owner, to put it mildly. Were it not for Dundon’s infusion of capital, sources told The Athletic, the AAF might not have been able to meet payroll that week. At the time, an AAF spokesperson denied that players were at risk of going unpaid.

 

So when Dundon and his own set of financial advisors came on board, he went through the books line by line and saw a certain amount of still-present debt. “When you’re investing in something you don’t want to acquire old debt,” Jacobson explained. (After promising to invest $250 million after taking control of the AAF board two weeks into the season, in the end Dundon only coughed up $70 million. One bankruptcy attorney who took a gander at the filing called the AAF’s balance sheet “crazy.”) The goal, then, was to “wipe the books clean so that so that we had a clean slate moving forward.”

 

Dundon told the “senior business management side” of the AAF, as Jacobson described them, that if they were able to negotiate with vendors and reduce the amount owed, the league would make good on those agreements and payments would be sent out within 48 hours. Jacobson, Farrell and other AAF officials were charged with executing this task.

 

Another AAF official involved in trying to claw back money from vendors confirmed Jacobson’s version of the events. The initial meeting took place in early March, when several league officials travelled to Dallas to meet with Dundon’s “team,” he said via Twitter direct message. (The official was not present at this meeting, but Farrell was.) Originally, Dundon’s team suggested asking all for a ten percent reduction from vendors. If they balked, he was given the authority to go as low as five percent, the official said. By the official’s telling, only one vendor agreed with the proposed terms and the reduction was close to three percent.

 

 

[dfwabel]

And more from SI

Quote

For Sternberg, it was startling to see how quickly the atmosphere bottomed out. After the AAF closed up, he says, one employee from each team was retained, for a small bonus, to recoup that franchise’s physical assets—hardware such as cameras, computers and televisions—and return them to the Alliance’s warehouse in San Antonio. That task proved more difficult than expected, though, because some of those assets started making their way out the door the day the AAF was shuttered.

“I watched the biggest loot-fest I’ve ever seen,” says Sternberg. “Cameras disappeared. Flat-screens. I watched a f------ full-time coach walk out of the building carrying a 55-inch TV. I watched people carry printers out. It was unbelievable.”

 

And Marshawn Lynch is in this too, but on the"good" side.

Quote

Another story that spread far across the AAF offices has Marshawn Lynch crashing the league’s quarterback draft last November at the Luxor casino in Las Vegas. According to one employee, Lynch, whose cousin Josh Johnson was the first pick in that draft, and who is notoriously media-averse, agreed to do a two-minute interview for the Alliance at that event in exchange for $5,000. But when a check was presented to Lynch, he asked that his money be delivered instead in quarters—which AAF co-founder Charlie Ebersol took seriously. In the end, 20,000 quarters were delivered to Lynch’s room and the interview apparently took place . . . but no one ever saw it. It didn’t air.

https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/05/08/alliance-of-american-football-aaf-collapse-more-stories-bill-murray-marshawn-lynch/

[Red Comet]

I'm glad @dfwabel has stayed on top of this because the more I hear about the AAF, the more unbelievable (but all too true) things emerge. Thanks, man.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

TWENTY THOUSAND QUARTERS!

[dfwabel]

18 minutes ago, DG_Now said:

TWENTY THOUSAND QUARTERS!

Such a heady play from Beast Mode.

 

He just had the casino take them back over to the casino cage and get it in paper money so he avoids depositing it only being held by the bank for a few days. Genius.