Wall Street Journal Article - Football League

Looking for investors for the ACFFL...............................
JNZ




Storied Investor's Football League Fumbles
By JOHN LETZING and JUSTIN SCHECK
Cal Sport Medi/Zuma Press

Las Vegas Locomotives running back Marcel Shipp (26) avoids two Sacramento Mountain Lions defenders during a September 2011 United Football League game in Sacramento.

William Hambrecht is a storied Silicon Valley financier who helped take companies including Apple Inc. public. But as one of Mr. Hambrecht's recent investments makes clear, not all of his plays turn out as intended.

Mr. Hambrecht founded an alternative professional football league called the United Football League, which started play in 2009 and now has four teams. His goal has been to eventually stage initial public offerings for individual squads.

To make the league a reality, Mr. Hambrecht, now 77 years old, pitched it to some of his friends: New York-based private-equity investor William Mayer and Paul Pelosi, a San Francisco real-estate investor and venture capitalist whose wife is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Messrs. Hambrecht, Mayer and Pelosi have invested a total of $120 million to $140 million in the UFL, estimates Mr. Mayer. The teams are based in Sacramento, Las Vegas, Omaha, Neb., and Virginia Beach, Va.

But things haven't worked out as planned, as the UFL has devolved into a morass of cash-flow problems and legal hassles. Many of the league's players say that despite personal guarantees from Mr. Hambrecht, they have yet to be fully paid for the 2012 season, according to interviews and documents from a lawsuit players have filed.

The UFL's number of regular-season games dropped to four a team last year, down from eight in 2010, with each of the past two seasons ending prematurely due to cash shortages. Mr. Mayer says the league will resume play in spring 2014.

In January 2012, then-UFL Commissioner Michael Huyghue resigned and shortly thereafter sued Mr. Hambrecht in a Duval County, Fla., court over unpaid salary; court documents show he was awarded a nearly $3.2 million judgment last April. Mr. Hambrecht said a settlement, for a sum he declined to disclose, has since been worked out, but not finalized. Mr. Huyghue declined to comment on the litigation.

Earlier this month, more than 70 UFL players sued Mr. Hambrecht in Nevada state court. In the suit, seeking unspecified damages, players alleged Mr. Hambrecht failed to honor personal guarantees they would be paid for their services last year.

"I tried to be very honest with everybody," says Mr. Hambrecht, noting that he intends for all UFL players to get paid eventually. He says he didn't discuss with players "deadlines" to make payments "so much as estimates of when we thought we'd come up with the money." He added, "It's just taken longer."

Mr. Hambrecht says he had wanted the UFL to launch with a broader group of investors, but the 2008 financial crisis complicated matters and the proper financing didn't materialize. Now, he says, "nobody seems to want to let this thing die."

Mr. Hambrecht says he may be able to free up funds to pay UFL players and other personnel due to a planned IPO of Sonoma County winery Truett-Hurst Inc., in which he owns a stake. Truett-Hurst filed IPO papers earlier this month. Mr. Hambrecht is also an investor in at least one other firm that he says is a potential IPO candidate. "I hope by next spring to be very liquid," he says.

Mr. Hambrecht's partners acknowledge the UFL situation is awkward. "You might ask, 'Mayer, you actually have a reputation of being a fairly sensible guy, what are you doing here, what's the matter with you?' " says Mr. Mayer, 72. "This is an expensive sport, more than I think we understood."

Adds Mr. Pelosi, also 72: "We're working diligently to pay our bills and clear the decks for next season."

Players for Mr. Pelosi's Sacramento Mountain Lions were the only ones who were fully paid after the 2012 season ended in October, according to Lions players and Mr. Pelosi. Mr. Mayer says the league is making further payments this week to players for the three other UFL teams, though they are yet to be fully compensated.

The problems Mr. Hambrecht and his partners are having underline the business hazards of pro sports. Expenses related to workers' compensation insurance for players were about twice what the three men anticipated, says Mr. Mayer. And initial efforts to gain local fans for the UFL were undercut by stationing the league's teams at an Arizona facility and flying them out to their respective cities only for games, hurting publicity and attendance.

"What we realized after the first year is, no one knows who the hell you are," Mr. Pelosi says.

Mr. Hambrecht formed investment bank Hambrecht & Quist in the late 1960s, with a then-novel focus on the technology industry. The firm underwrote IPOs for companies including Apple and Amazon.com Inc. After Chase Manhattan Corp. agreed to buy Hambrecht & Quist in 1999 for $1.35 billion, Mr. Hambrecht formed San Francisco-based WR Hambrecht + Co., an investment firm that offers an alternative auction-based model for IPOs.

In the UFL, Mr. Hambrecht owns the Las Vegas Locomotives and Omaha Nighthawks, Mr. Mayer owns the Virginia Destroyers, and Mr. Pelosi the Sacramento Mountain Lions.

The UFL initially tapped management with NFL experience like Mr. Huyghue, whose Jacksonville, Fla., UFL offices had about 30 employees. Former NFL standouts such as quarterback Jeff Garcia also signed on.

Mr. Pelosi says the Mountain Lions drew as many as 20,000 fans a game in 2010, the UFL's second season. That year, the league also began having players and coaches live in their host cities during the season.

But attracting a sufficient number of paying ticket holders proved difficult. Many attendees showed up with free, promotional tickets. "They did come," Mr. Pelosi says, "but it didn't give you revenue."

As the UFL faltered, it sought to cut costs. The Florida headquarters was replaced by local staff in the teams' host cities.

Chad Kilgore, a linebacker who signed with the Mountain Lions for the 2012 season, says the effort to curb expenses was apparent. Occasionally, he says, the team would stage so-called walk-through practices inside its hotel. "Sometimes it was the lobby of the hotel, sometimes it was a little 50-foot patch of grass by the parking lot," says Mr. Kilgore. "The whole demeanor of the team was, 'This is a joke.' "

Mr. Huyghue says he ultimately realized the UFL was becoming "a boutique league" for its owners. He says he urged the owners to suspend operations until they could secure a sufficiently lucrative television contract.

Mr. Mayer said the TV contract the league secured in July, with CBS Sports Network, while not a big money maker, is "an important building block" for the UFL. The owners say they want to press ahead and can yet capitalize on football's popularity, harvesting players on the NFL's fringes, and by staging games in non-NFL towns. "It still remains the most profitable media product there is," Mr. Hambrecht says of the sport.

After Mr. Huyghue's departure, a 2012 UFL season began belatedly last September, giving players only several days between initial practices and opening games. Former Virginia Destroyers quarterback Chris Greisen says when his team took the field for that season opener, all but one of the offensive linemen there to protect him were new.

"I got pretty battered," says Mr. Greisen, who has had stints with NFL teams including the Arizona Cardinals. He adds that he has only been paid a portion of what he is owed for last year. He hasn't joined the lawsuit filed by his fellow UFL players earlier this month.

"We will pay the balance that we owe the players shortly," says Mr. Mayer, the Destroyers owner.

In theory, the UFL will one day have between six and eight teams, Mr. Pelosi says, with possible new locations in cities like San Antonio. "Our idea now is to come back with a completely different economic model and run it like a bootstrapped startup."

Some fans are awaiting the UFL's return. "I really do love the league," says Tommy Scott, a computer programmer in Henderson, Nev., adding he enjoyed Las Vegas Locomotives games with his daughter—and even paid for the tickets.

Write to John Letzing at john.letzing@dowjones.com and Justin Scheck at justin.scheck@wsj.com

From Peter King SI MMQB.....

' did not know this about Elway, just an additional reason not to like even more.
JNZ

Revenge is best served cold, but this is ridiculous. It took 30 years for Baltimore to finally get revenge on John Elway. Thirty years next month, the Baltimore Colts drafted Elway with the first pick in the NFL Draft. Elway didn't want to play for taskmaster head coach Frank Kush, and so his agent, Marvin Demoff, went about the work of trying to create an alternate market for Elway, both in baseball and in the NFL. Elway was a great baseball prospect too, having played a minor-league season with the Yankees' Rookie League team in 1982. Owner George Steinbrenner loved Elway and projected him to be a starting outfielder for the Yankees by 1985. The Colts got the message and felt the leverage. Baltimore traded Elway to Denver a week after the draft, but the eventual compensation (Mark Herrmann, Chris Hinton and Ron Solt) wasn't close to the dividends Elway paid Denver. It's tough to equate -- no, not tough; impossible -- Baltimore losing Elway to, 30 years later, Baltimore stealing one of Denver president Elway's 10 most important players. But in 2013, to Ravens fans, it'll do. In Baltimore, Elvis is about to enter the building. Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/nfl/news/20130325/elvis-dumervil-baltimore-ravens-peter-king-monday-morning-quarterback/#ixzz2Okuo4mF1

In case you've been wondering - Per the ESPN Boston Patriots Blog

April 19 the deadline on Sanders
March, 25, 2013
Mar 25
2:00
PM ET
Since a visit with the Patriots shortly after the opening of free agency, we haven't heard much as it relates to Steelers restricted free agent wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders.

One of the questions that has come up regarding Sanders and the Patriots' potential interest is the deadline for the team to sign him to an offer sheet.

The answer is April 19, at which point the Steelers would have five days to match the Patriots' offer and retain Sanders or decline it and receive the Patriots' 2013 third-round draft choice.

Many have asked if the Patriots remain interested in Sanders given that no offer has been formally agreed to, but there could be an element of timing in this situation. The Steelers are in the midst of a tight financial situation, which could be one of the reasons that Sanders received an original-round tender rather than a first or second-round tender, which would have made an offer sheet less likely.

Pittsburgh has holes to fill this offseason, and the Patriots (if they are still interested in Sanders) could be waiting for the Steelers to make other roster moves, which would further limit their cap space and ability to match an offer.

So while we don't specifically know where the team stands on Sanders, we do have a timeline of when the Patriots would have to act by in order to acquire him.

http://espn.go.com/blog/boston/new-england-patriots/

NPR Story

­ So, Would You Eat A Panda? by Barbara J. King October 18, 2012 9:36 AM Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images A Chinese scientist recently suggested that prehistoric humans ate pandas. The evidence, based on cut marks on panda bones, strikes me as thin, but the report led me to a thought experiment. How would people in the modern world react if the some population or subculture today made panda-foraging a goal? I imagine most of us would be horrified, and not only because the panda is an endangered species. The panda has become a symbol of cuteness, an animal we love to love. Although some pretty neat research is underway seeking a genetic substrate for certain taste preferences, anthropologists know that what people choose to eat and what we find out of the question to eat is a deeply cultural matter. What we consume is bound up in a specific time and place with family, tradition, and ethnic identity in complicated ways. Many of us can probably remember a time when, traveling far from home, we felt incredulous at what foods people around us were eating with nonchalance — or with lip-smacking enthusiasm. Years ago, newly arrived in Gabon, West Africa, and about to study captive chimpanzees, I dined at a small rural restaurant. Selecting chicken from the menu, I was urged to try another dish: monkey. I couldn't imagine eating a monkey! I was after all, devoting my professional life to observing monkeys and apes, whom I knew to be thinking and feeling creatures. When my chicken and French fries arrived, I discovered coarse black hairs nestled among the food. Part of the monkey had slipped onto my plate after all. I picked out and discarded the monkey hairs. But I ate the chicken without a second thought. These days, I couldn't eat that chicken any more than I could eat the monkey. Although not in ways as complex as primates, chickens do, science tells us, think and feel. I still very occasionally eat fish. And I seem to have a harder and harder time understanding how any of us draw the line about what we will and won't eat. In the same way that panda-eating wouldn't be acceptable to most of us in this country, there was outrage expressed when a Colorado restaurant put lion on the menu for a special event. The lion was soon enough removed from the menu, but other exotic species such as kangaroo and water buffalo were not. So what is it about lions and pandas — and cats and dogs? What keeps these animals off our dining tables, when we readily consume, say, pigs and chickens? And we don't just eat pigs and chickens, we rhapsodize about eating them. In last Sunday's Food magazine of The New York Times, Mario Batali wrote blissfully about the odd foods he encountered on a visit to Tokyo, ranging from pork uterus to chicken kneecaps, using words like "exciting" and "heavenly." Of course, I'm generalizing. Millions of vegetarians and vegans don't eat chicken kneecaps, or any other part of chickens, turkeys, pigs, lambs or cows. I don't either. People in that category hope, for the animals' sake and for the sake of human health, that people lucky enough to have an economic choice in the matter will eat less of these creatures or none at all. So are we non-meat-eaters bucking cultural tradition, and forging a new identity based on what we don't eat instead of what we do eat? We're not just non-panda-eaters, like everyone else. In this country, at least, we are still an anomaly, and an evolutionary anomaly at that. In the Homo lineage, according to new research by anthropologist Henry Bunn on our hominid ancestors from Olduvai, Tanzania, we've been big-game hunters for longer than I'd ever thought: about 2 million years. We've been eating meat for longer than that, via scavenging or taking small game opportunistically. Our evolutionary history, though, cannot explain what each of us finds delectable or disgusting today. And it shouldn't, and doesn't, define our dietary choices, either. http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/10/18/162959912/so-would-you-eat-a-panda You can keep up with more of what Barbara is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape

NPR Story; The Computers Behind The Cloud

The Computers Behind The Cloud Categories: The Industry 08:26 am October 17, 2012

by Jordan G. Teicher October 17, 2012 Listen to the Story Morning Edition   Enlarge Connie Zhou/Google Google's data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, houses servers in over 115,000 square feet of space. Connie Zhou/Google Google's data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, houses servers in over 115,000 square feet of space. Behind the ephemeral "cloud" of cloud computing, the network we use for everything from checking our email to streamlining our health care system, there lies a very tangible and very big computer infrastructure. But besides a glimpse at some of the hardware in 2009, there has been little information about Google's data centers, the warehoused collections of servers that have given the company the foundation for its vast Internet operations. Today, the company is throwing open the gates to the world — digitally, of course. It has released a site featuring photos of facilities from Belgium to Finland to Iowa and launched a guided Street View tour of one in Lenoir, N.C. Enlarge Connie Zhou/Google A rare look behind the server aisle in Mayes County, Okla. Hundreds of fans funnel hot air from the server racks into a cooling unit to be recirculated. This is the first time Google has opened the doors of its data centers to outsiders. Connie Zhou/Google A rare look behind the server aisle in Mayes County, Okla. Hundreds of fans funnel hot air from the server racks into a cooling unit to be recirculated. This is the first time Google has opened the doors of its data centers to outsiders. It's the same facility the company revealed in an exclusive tour to Wired senior writer Steven Levy, whose story on Google's infrastructure appears in the magazine's November issue. In an interview with Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep, Levy described going where no Google outsider has gone before: "What strikes you immediately is the scale of things. The room is so huge you can almost see the curvature of Earth on the end. And wall to wall are racks and racks and racks of servers with blinking blue lights and each one is many, many times more powerful and with more capacity than my laptop. And you're in the throbbing heart of the Internet. You really feel it." Google has a lot of servers — Levy reports 49,923 in Lenoir alone. The total worldwide number eludes even Google's executives, but there have been at least 1 million cumulatively, according to a plaque Levy found on the premises. Google is not the only company with massive computer networks. In 2006, Microsoft built a giant data center on 75 acres of bean fields in Quincy, Wash. Yahoo and Dell, among other companies, have also set up data centers in Quincy. But Google's data center technology is unique, Levy says, which is partly responsible for the company's success — and a cause for the secrecy surrounding it. "One technique that Google really pioneered was keeping things hotter than has been traditionally expected in a data center," Levy says. "In old data centers, you would put on a sweater before you went in there. Google felt that you could run the general facility somewhat warmer than even normal room temperature. When I walked into Lenoir I think it was 77 degrees." The trick to keeping the heat under control, Levy writes, is a "hot aisle," a space that harnesses hot air from the servers into water-filled coils, sends it out of the building to cool, and then circulates it back inside. This is a dramatic departure from traditional centers, which use large amounts of energy on air conditioning. Levy says that the specific technology varies from center to center and that Google has considered the local resources and geography in each design. That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that the centers don't have an environmental cost. "There's no way around it. These things burn a lot of energy, and a lot of the energy in a data center is done to cool it down so the computers don't melt. Data centers in general consume 1.5 percent roughly of all the world's electricity," Levy says. Google's servers have been getting progressively faster and cheaper, and even now the company has plans to completely change the basics of the system in places like Lenoir. But the specifics of those changes will remain secret — at least for now. "Google may be dedicated to providing access to all the world's data, but some information it's still keeping to itself," Levy writes.