On Wednesday night in Coney Island, about 80 football players worked on their résumés in heavy rain in front of a small crowd on a field painted over a Class A baseball diamond.
The players for the Brooklyn Bolts and the Boston Brawlers, nearly all of whom had preseason or practice-squad experience in the N.F.L., braved the deluge in the brand-new Fall Experimental Football League in the hopes of climbing back to the sports top tier. For many of them, the Brooklyn crowd stymied by the weather and the timing was their smallest audience since Pop Warner.
Theres things were having to endure that we havent experienced in a long time, Brawlers quarterback Tajh Boyd, the 2012 Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year while at Clemson, said before boarding a bus for the trip back to Boston. He chose to give the F.X.F.L. a try after the Jets cut him in August.
The football landscape is littered with the remains of professional leagues come and gone: the United Football League, the United States Football League and the X.F.L. F.X.F.L. organizers acknowledged the challenge, but said the N.F.L. needed a minor league to help players with professional talent and nowhere to play.
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Fans endured the elements at the Bolts' first home game of the season. Credit Earl Wilson/The New York Times
Were keeping these guys battle-ready, said Brian Woods, the F.X.F.L.s founder and commissioner. This is better than the Canadian football product. I can assure you its way better than the arena football product.
Woods and the F.X.F.L. have tried to avoid the mistakes made by past ventures by keeping costs down. The 160 players on the leagues four teams make a maximum of $1,000 per game during the six-week season.
That is not a lot of money to put ones body through the physical rigors of football, but the league has several rules designed to avoid concussions and other serious injuries.
