Why not minor league football?

Well, there's Arena Football, right?  http://www.arenafootball.com/

United Football League, too: http://www.ufl-football.com/

So, you have at least two possibilities.

Cam Newton jokes aside, players might see more upside to playing in college (visibility, coaching, education for the ones that are so inclined).

"... its pretty unfair that these kids don't have an option to be paid ..."

That seems like a separate conversation, doesn't it?

is very poorly financed and organized. Teams show up with 12 guys, borrow equipment, scrap games at the last instant, and have no worthwhile coaching whatsoever. It's not productive to developing as a player.

Furthermore, you don't get a college degree out of it. So what happens if you're not good enough to go pro? YOu end up with nothing but a few bucks a week, at most. And for what it's worth, many minor football leagues are actually pay to play from the players.

Wholly owned development league. Occasionally players go from one to the other.

USC is a minor league team (and Auburn).

Because of the physical nature of football, a minor league would almost have to be age-based.  We have seen first-hand the disadvantage younger players have against older ones, especially on the lines, because they aren't physically ready to take on players in their twenties.   

There would have to be a place where OL and DL candidates could sit on the bench for a year or two as they do in major college programs.  The main problem is that professionals, for the most part, won't pay someone to sit on the bench, grow, and learn.  Or, it would have to be tiered like baseball's minor leagues are. 

As it was already noted, the NFL already has a free, de facto minor league, so there is no way they would spend the money required to form their own minor league.  As fans in markets where games are occasionally blacked out already know, the NFL is the greediest of all the professional leagues.  I can't see them buying a dairy farm when they are already getting free milk from the NCAA.

Where I live, there are 2 minor league baseball teams within 45 minutes of me.  I couldn't tell you a single player on either team, either one of them won their division.  There is no exposure for minor league teams, where as colleges have tradition and lots of media attention.  It is a lot easier to cheer for an alma mater than for a city team that you have little connection to.  College football has to much money involved to just vanish.

Minor leagues could work, but have all of the limitations already noted above: lack of financial support, presence of TV and Internet means people can watch the big teams - why watch the local minor league teams, age and growth issues, etc.

Sports is major part of American culture. It has economic impact and clearly is a major part of many people's lives (just look at this blog) and how many people's weekends center around various sports.

What needs to be done is to end the hypocrisy in major college sports. Many college sports are all about the 1950's vision of team work, camaraderie and sportsmanship. But for the big money sports, face reality, the top players view this time as a training period, a stepping stone to a future professional career. So why not make that possible. Have the NCAA abandon its 1920's base shamateurism and go open. Once tennis and the olympic sports were like the NCAA - full of fake amateurs taking money under the table. Now it is all open. Realistically if you are serious tennis player today, by the time you are 16-17 you have to be playing at an international level if you ever hope to be a pro or win a major championship. For girls, if you aspire to be gymnast you probably need to be international caliber or darn close by th time you are in your 13-14. For college tennis and gymnasts, there isn't a likely pro path and so we don't have those issues.

Universities across the country grant degrees in drama and performance music - and musicians and actors hardly have lives any easier or longer in duration than athletes. Only a few really make it big and the rest struggle, yet there is no outcry about this. Why not let the top players "study" sport - Do we limit how much an architecture student can study in the summer? Are we upset if the engineering student gets an internship with a top engineering firm? If someone in the drama or music department left school to take a major role in a film or with an orchestra wouldn't the alumni magazine be touting this? Let's stop pretending football is some nice extra curricular activity done as a pass time by some nice college boys when they are not in the library.

We don't have to pay the players - but we should make training available year round and by top professionals - in the sport, in nutrition, in psych, and they should be taught the financial realities. The real shame isn't just the fake student athletes, but the number of kids who just string along until they use their eligibility. With a performance sports major, pro scouts would be allowed to come to campus (just like recruiters for companies) and kids will know do they have what it takes. There will still be room for real student athletes, just most of the musicians in the school bands and orchestras are NOT music majors, but they'll not be under any illusions.

College football is the only minor league football that will make money, because millions of people have a built-in emotional bond to local schools or their alma mater and will pay money to watch their teams play.

To get a minor football league to work well, you might have to disband college football.

Let's say for the sake of argument that Demar Dorsey's one great talent in the world is playing football.  It's a shame that he might not get the chance to do that professionally because his grades are bad.  If he was a baseball player, he could just go straight from high school into the minors and his chances of playing major league baseball wouldn't suffer for that at all.

So far, no one has found a way to make it work as a business model.  People vote with their money, and minor league football has not been able to attract enough votes to garner enough money to make it a viable business proposition. 

Everytime some revelation comes out about some player that has skirted the official rules, someone brings up this kind of stuff.  Remember that only a very small percentage (2.4%) of  college football players ever make it to the next level.  And the average NFL career is 4 seasons..... 

College football is not really about developing players for the NFL, that is just a current fall out.  College football was big and filled stadiums long before the NFL became the huge business it is today.  It is about people voting with their money to invest their civic or school pride into a group of men that represent their school or locality to the rest of the world. 

to institute a true minor league system without somehow undermining college football. I have always felt that guys like Clarett, Marques Slocum, etc. (guys with tremendous athletic talent but no interest/motivation for school) should be able to take their talents out into a free job market, just like everyone else, and not be tied down by academic requirements. It just seems like every year you hear about a gifted athlete who will never make it to the pros because he just isn't smart/motivated enough to meet the demands of college. To make an analogy, it would be like one of us short/out of shape/skinny but academically inclined people not being able to enter the job market because, although we do well in school, we cannot bench press 400 lbs or run a 4.4 forty. Just doesn't seem fair.

Sadly for some, there will never be minor league football while college football is so huge.  Even in basketball, the European leagues are emerging as a viable option for guys that can't/don't want to stay in school. 

It would be nice if the UFL evolves into a viable stepping stone.  The original plan was to be a spring league and play in college towns; there would even be an emphasis on taking alumni.  Would you watch John Navarre and Brandon Minor?  Yeah, me too.  Don't know what happened to that plan. 

John U. Bacon says that you have to look at how each sport developed in its infancy in order to explain the presence or lack of a well-developed minor league. Baseball and hockey developed as professional sports before college baseball and hockey (NHL founded 1917, Michigan first drops the puck in 1923/ MLB has the first World Series in 1903, College Baseball has its first tournament in 1947) so the pros had to develop a feeder league.

Football and basketball, on the other hand, developed at the college level before they did so at the pro level. The NFL was formed in 1920 when Fielding Yost was already sitting on 5 national titles and Michigan had already produced a bunch of All-Americans (plus the NFL didn't truly become popular until the mid- to late-1950s). The same goes for basketball--the NIT (the first postseason basketball tournament) was first played in 1938, whereas the NBA wasn't even founded until 1946. So when the NFL and NBA first got off the ground they already had ready-made minor leagues (college) whereas the college equivalents of the MLB and NHL had to catch up to the already-successful professionals.