Columnist Dean Juipe: Please, we don’t need AFL team

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, July 30, 2002 | 9:33 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

Guilty of having too much free time, twice over the weekend I switched the TV to Arena Football League playoff games.

But it was more than boredom that served as an incentive.

After all, Las Vegas was home to an Arena team for the 1994 and '95 seasons, and the mayor of this fair city has mentioned bringing an Arena (or an Arena-2) team back here in the event the terminally delayed downtown arena ever gets built.

However, judging by the caliber of play in the league today, as well as its perceived lack of value on the national stage and its inability to draw spectators even to its most important games, we're better off without an Arena Football League reprise. We're not missing a thing.

Monday's USA Today failed to mention the ongoing AFL playoffs or the weekend results, which speaks volumes for the league as a money-making entity or thrill-seeking venture. It's a bust, a cause rather than a cure for the summertime blues.

It's eight-man football played on a miniaturized field by guys who are athletic enough yet insignificant as a whole. The game I focused on, Tampa Bay vs. Los Angeles at the sparsely filled Staples Center and won by the visitors by a 66-41 score, was an atrocity from a purist's standpoint in that the participants were negligent when it came to fundamentals and wildly indifferent when it came to the most basic element of the sport, tackling.

I mused that at any given time of day there are enough able-bodied men crossing the elevated walkway between the Barbary Coast and Caesars Palace to comprise a viable Arena team. In that respect, and that respect alone, the AFL is the peoples' league.

During the AFL's previous tenure here, at the Grand Garden Arena, the Sting had a few exciting moments yet no tears were shed when the team capitulated. In the ensuing years no one has launched a campaign or tugged at our heartstrings in an attempt to replace it either.

Yet an AFL franchise, or one in its understudy league that goes by a similar name, has been discussed as a tenant should Las Vegas build a downtown arena. If it happens, it will fail too.

The trouble with leagues of this ilk -- and we've had experience with a bunch of them -- is twofold: a general and widespread indifference, compounded by a lack of familiarity with the players or interest in their games' outcomes. If no one beyond a select few cares who wins and if the media refuses to board the bandwagon, a team in this town is doomed.

That would be the case for an Arena team at a downtown facility where it's going to be a hassle to park.

Las Vegas is doing just fine without the horde of minor-league teams that once inundated the valley, each promising to be the next big thing. The Arena Football League when it was here last time was borderline interesting and presented in a wonderful setting, yet it didn't catch on.

The Sting didn't create much of a buzz and, based on the current status of the AFL and the unheralded men it employs, a successor would track a similar course.

Las Vegas may yet build an arena but that doesn't mean it needs an Arena team, given the looks of the shabby product it had on the field the other day.