Indoor voices

Comes now the news that Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne is beginning talks with another start-up indoor football league, and this takes the Blob back some.

I was around for the first iteration of indoor football in Fort Wayne, you see. Also the second, third and fourth iterations.

This makes the Blob deeply skeptical about the entire enterprise, on account of indoor football is a niche sport that, on a level designed for markets the size of Fort Wayne, is always going to be problematical. Either you get scammed by quick-buck artists or you wind up with chronically under-capitalized ownership that can't pay its bills or in some cases its players. Both have happened in Fort Wayne; both have made the principals involved on the Coliseum side rightly cautious of jumping into this pool again.

Cautious, but not cowed.

This is not to say the product itself isn't attractive. It is, and it had a fiercely passionate core fan base in Fort Wayne. That was not the issue. The issue was the size of that core fan base (very small) and how the teams managed to augment it.

The first version of the Freedom, Fort Wayne's initial foray into the minor-league niche-ery of indoor football, drew extremely well, for instance. But it had to paper the house with free tickets to do so. Subsequent attempts didn't draw nearly as well, and had other issues endemic to the product.

The second attempt (the Fusion) lasted one season before the team's owner was kicked out of the league for basically being a con man. The same thing happened to the third attempt. The fourth attempt lasted less than one season; it had to cancel its last home game because its opponent went out of business.

None of that is an anomaly in minor-league indoor football, mind you. It's pretty much the nature of the beast.

This newest venture is tentatively named the National Gridiron League, which hopes to begin play next March with a dozen teams. It will be a single-owner entity with potential local investors, and Coliseum officials seem to think the overall structure is solid.

I know what I think.

I think I hear "single owner," and I immediately think "Isiah Thomas."

Who bought the venerable Continental Basketball Association during one of his hiatuses from running NBA franchises into the ground. And who destroyed a league that been around for decades in less than 18 months.

Please, God. Not again.