Charlie Ebersol and Bill Polian Have a Lot of Explaining to Do in AAF Collapse

In the lead-up to the launch of the AAF, you couldn’t sneeze without coming out of it and seeing a new story or interview in which Charlie Ebersol was gushing about the upstart league. Fox Sports Radio, SportTechie, CBS Sports Radio, CBS News, Connecticut Magazine, New York Business Journal, FOX Business. I could go on and on, finding more of these, but he generally projected a level of confidence such that you wouldn’t have thought they’d need a massive bailout before the second week and shutter before the end of their inaugural season.

Perhaps there’s a reasonable explanation for everything that happened, but if that exists, we haven’t heard it. Ebersol has not tweeted since March 28th and, as best of my knowledge, has not issued a statement about the league suspending operations. His co-founder Bill Polian issued this statement:

"I am extremely disappointed to learn Tom Dundon has decided to suspend all football operations of the Alliance of American Football. When Mr. Dundon took over, it was the belief of my co-founder, Charlie Ebersol, and myself that we would finish the season, pay our creditors, and make the necessary adjustments to move forward in a manner that made economic sense for all. The momentum generated by our players, coaches and football staff had us well positioned for future success. Regrettably, we will not have that opportunity."

This extreme disappointment doesn’t really do much for the people who bought into Polian and Ebersol’s business acumen and now have less than nothing to show for it. By now, you’ve seen the horror stories about players being left high and dry, stuck with hotel tabs that it’s nightmarishly incumbent on them to dispute, not getting covered for their flights home, and not knowing how they will address injuries sustained in AAF play.

When Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon bailed out the league with what was initially reported as a $250 million investment but has since been described as $70 million, Ebersol vigorously disputed reports that the league could not meet payroll and was in financial jeopardy. As the sports legal analyst Darren Heitner pointed out, look at the supreme confidence Ebersol projected after this cash infusion on the Rich Eisen Show:

It’s astounding that this league was rushed so haphazardly that it needed this investment by its second week of games. From the outside, it sure looks like they were so hasty to beat the XFL to market that they did not nearly have their ducks in a row. How could they possibly in good conscience launch a league that didn’t have the capital to even make it through a year? Didn’t Ebersol heed any of the lessons of the cautionary tale of the XFL documentary he made for ESPN?

PFT managing editor Michael David Smith is right when he says that Ebersol and Polian have a “moral obligation” to document exactly what transpired throughout this process. It does not hold water to put it all on Dundon when they had to court his cash infusion in the first place. How did they get to the point where they needed his money? And if he broke promises to them, do they have documentation of that in writing?

It must be profoundly hurtful for both Ebersol and Polian to have this venture that they poured their soul into to launch into existence fail so soon, but full transparency of everything that went wrong with it is literally the least they could do.