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Arena Football League turns 20

We are not a minor league of the NFL. It`s a different game with different skills and different types of players, said Danny White, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback and a veteran coach in the Arena Football League. The AFL is no longer a novelty. The AFL entered its 20th season this weekend, quite a milestone for something many wrote off as a fad when kicks first started bouncing off nets back into play, and football was stuffed inside basketball and hockey arenas.

AFL teams have some big-time financial backing. Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway (Colorado Crush), singers Jon Bon Jovi (Philadelphia Soul) and Tim McGraw (Nashville Kats) and coaching legend Mike Ditka (Chicago Rush) are parts of ownership groups. Rosters are much smaller, so most players play offense and defense instead of specializing. And the sidelines are basically hockey boards with some padding ? and advertising ? running the length of the field.

From a fledgling four-team league that added some intrigue to the 1987 summer cable TV lineup, the AFL is at 18 teams with plans to grow, has a development league in smaller markets, and network television deals with NBC and Fox Sports Net. And so the results are in: The Arena Football League is undeniably quirky and quite popular. And as much as football fundamentalists may hate it, it`s not going away.