Downed punts

In the end, you are what you are in this world. You can adorn a thing with bells and whistles, pretend it fills a need or demand or simply claim there is a market for it, but ultimately what you are reveals itself -- all illusions notwithstanding.

And so the Alliance of American Football is done, after less than a season.

And the National Gridiron League -- and the Indiana Blue Bombers that were Fort Wayne's entry in this chimera of an indoor football entity -- is done before it begins.

The first happened because minor league football is still minor league football, no matter how you dress it up.

The second happened because minor league indoor football is chronically sketchy and undercapitalized at best, and an out-and-out shell game at worst.

Color the NGL the latter, and woe on anyone who didn't see it from the jump. There were any number of klaxons going off, certainly; in Fort Wayne alone, there were fraudulent players and a convicted felon for a coach and no boots-on-the-ground presence whatsoever except for a website where, surprise, surprise, the NGL would gladly separate you from your money for tickets to a product that never had a prayer of existing.

Good luck seeing any of that money again, if you were one of the unfortunate souls who bought what the NGL was selling. That money's in the wind, just like league owner Joe McClendon was largely in the wind last night, when local media was reaching out to him to explain himself.

All you had to do was watch the introductory news conference in Fort Wayne to know the NGL, and McClendon himself, were not on the up-and-up. The whole thing smelled to high heaven, especially to those of us who've seen all the other incarnations of indoor football in the Fort. McClendon had no answers to even the most basic questions -- and now personnel who signed onto this in good faith are reporting they've never been paid a dime of the salaries they were promised. Additionally, operational money has vanished without a trace.

Unavoidable conclusion: They've all been fleeced as thoroughly as some poor rube on a carnival midway.

And the Alliance of American Football?

Supposedly the long-term goal was to establish itself as a developmental league for the NFL, but the premise -- that the American appetite for football was an insatiable one -- was flawed to begin with. Turns out that insatiable American appetite was for the NFL, not any old football. Oh, people tuned in initially out of curiosity, but by the second week investors were already having to bail out the league, and by the end of March teams were drawing as few as 9,000 fans to stadiums that seated 50,000 or more.

Unavoidable conclusion: Minor-league football played by NFL washouts was not going to sell, particularly in the very wheelhouse of March Madness, the start of the baseball season and the enormous draw the NBA has become.

 Truth is, sports are star-driven now, and the AAF had no stars. NFL fans tune in to see Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady and Pat Mahomes and Odell Beckham Jr. Trent Richardson and Johnny Manziel, on the other hand, are simply not appointment viewing.

Plus, the NFL is nearly a year-round entity now. The season begins with training camp in July and ends with the Super Bowl in February. The league plays on Sunday afternoons and Sunday nights and Monday nights and Thursday nights, and occasionally Saturdays, too. And when the season ends, the run-up to the NFL Draft in April begins. It's virtual wall-to-wall market saturation.

And that doesn't even include college football, a thriving professional venture in its own right which literally plays every day of the week now.

You are what you are, in the end.

An inferior product in a market stuffed with superior product, on the one hand.

A pea under a shell on the other. 

Update: NGL owner/president Joe McClendon has announced the league will now kick off in 2020. In other news, oceanfront property in Nebraska is going for cheap.