I’m Proposing A New Football League

WJ Cope10 years ago

Many of you have seen a Senior PGA match, and I recommend you check one out if you haven’t. The legends of yesteryear are still legends, and watching them in their twilight years reaffirms the notion that an octogenarian can beat you at golf. Really brings you down a notch. However, this concept should not be limited to golf and a few other sports anymore. We’re going straight for the top, to the most popular sport in America: football.

A senior league in football. Are you mad, WJ? Hell yes I am. Here’s how this would work. Players would of course have to be retired from the NFL in order to be a member of the SFL (Senior Football League). Not only that, but they would have to be at least 55 years old. Each roster would consist of 25 players, room for 22 starters and three alternates. Of these 25, five of them could be age 55-58, five more ages 59-62, five aged 63-66, five aged 67-70, and the last five older than 70.

There would be a full draft and free agency period, and General Managers would have to strategize as to which of the younger guys they would want on their team, as they aren’t going to get a ton of help from the 70+ gents. Every year, there would also be a lottery, with the winning team getting to choose a newly-retired player such as Peyton Manning.

Of course, the field wouldn’t be a full hundred yards long. Many of these guys would be hard-pressed to run that far, so we’ll cut the size of the field in half. If a player is severely injured, they do not receive medical treatment and instead have to keep playing. If they should die on the football field, their body is quickly removed during a commercial break and the game continues. There’s no need to worry about the longterm effects of CTE and frequent collisions, because they’ve already set in a long time ago.

There is a full preseason, 16 games, then a postseason that culminates in the…Senior Bowl is already taken. Shit. Anyway, the winning team of the championship gets to be free from this madness forever, getting released from their contracts immediately. They also get compensated, but it’s only in the realm of around a thousand dollars, because old people don’t know the value of money anyway.

There would have to be other key differences between the SFL and NFL. There would need to be a Reserve/Passed Away list to accommodate those that die during the season, and a compensatory pick system built around it. There would still be cheerleaders for each team, and they would be just as finely aged as the players. Player salaries would be much lower than in the NFL, because why pretend that we’re respecting our elders when we’re already making them play a violent sport against each other for our entertainment? There could even be a system of punishments that instantly gives NFL players a mandatory year in the senior league for certain infractions. So you’ve committed domestic violence? Congratulations, your ass is getting a year in the SFL 30 years from now. It’s a hell of a lot worse than the current punishment for domestic violence, which is…well, sometimes you get suspended.

If watching your elders beat the tar out of each other wasn’t entertaining, then we wouldn’t have Bad Grandpa. Let’s get the Senior Football League off the ground and hobbling..

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