Throughout the season longterm AFL fan/media site ArenaFan has complained about the talent level in the AFL. This culminated in Adam Markowitz's ArenaBowl preview where he said:
After all, it's pretty clear that both of these teams would have been smoked by basically any other ArenaBowl team from the 2000s before the league went on hiatus in 2009. The talent level just isn't there anymore for various reasons.
The bulk of the argument has been that the pay grade in the league no longer attracts top talent. But I see a different answer.
One major thing that the league had in the past decade, when the league saw the talent level raise, was the af2. The af2 served as a developmental league for arena football. No longer did teams have to train rookies on the fly throughout the season. The af2, centered in mid-market cities that would probably never house an AFL franchise, took mostly regional players and taught them the game.
In fact the last Rookie of the Year before the demise of the old AFL was former af2 Tulsa Talon Donovan Morgan. That same year, ArenaBowl champion Jeff Hughley almost made the leap to the AFL as a part of the Colorado Crush. And these were not the only players to do so. They were able to jump right into the AFL without much of a learning curve.
It was just this past week when I realized how important this development in the af2 was. I was reminiscing about the Talons' season and how great it would have been if the team that ended the season started the season. But it wasn't the actual players I was referring to; it was the experience the players had gained.
At the start of the season the Talons' defensive backfield, which had two rookie players, was horrible. The team gave up touchdowns on a multitude of busted coverages. These guys just did not understand the game. But what happened about five games into the season? It finally clicked. The biggest example was J.C. Neal's record setting game against the Blaze where J.C. demolished the AFL record for INT return yards in a single game.
In the old AFL this would not have happened. Players like J.C. would spend a season (or less) in the af2 before moving on to the AFL. But now, you have a decent amount of teams carrying a number of these rookie players who still have to learn the game. As a result, the first half of the season is going to be a little ugly until the players finally "get it".
As such, I don't think simply increasing pay will improve the talent of the AFL. What the league needs is experience. The only place that will come from is playing time. Accordingly, that will either come in the form of a developmental league, or at the cost of games early in the season.
