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Traina Thoughts: AAF Debuts This Weekend With a Rule the NFL Should Adopt

New Alliance of American Football league won't have glaring officiating mistakes.

Jimmy Traina

AAF

1. The NFL season is over, but you can still get a football fix this weekend thanks to the Alliance of American Football league, which debuts Saturday. 

CBS will air regional coverage of two games Saturday night at 8:30 p.m. ET. The San Diego Fleet visit the San Antonio Commanders with Spero Dedes, Trent Green and Tiki Barber calling the game, while Andrew Catalon and Gary Danielson will handle broadcast duties for the Atlanta Legends-Orlando Apollos game. On Sunday, the Memphis Express faces the Birmingham Iron on CBS Sports Network at 4 p.m. ET. Ben Holden, Adam Archuletta and John Schriffen will call that matchup.

Will you tune into any of action? Let me know below.

Before getting started the AAF has two things going for it. First, it looks like they will not have any horrendous calls like we saw in the NFC Championship game. The league will have a sky judge for every game. This person will be in the press box correct "obvious and egregious" officiating errors. The AAF says "the sky judge will use real-time technology to correct clear errors involving player safety anytime during a game and pass interference inside of five minutes left in the fourth quarter." 

I'm not sure why they'd only use the sky judge inside of five minutes of the fourth quarter instead of the whole game, but at least this is a start and if successful, something the NFL may copy.

The other thing the AAF has going for it: betting lines. If you plan on watching the games mentioned earlier, Orlando is -5 vs. Atlanta, San Antonio is -3 against San Diego and Birmingham is -3 against Memphis.

Notable players and coaches in the league: Orlando is coached by Steve Spurrier, Atlanta's QB is former Georgia star, Aaron Murray. Rick Neuheisel is the head coach in Arizona and his quarterback is Trevor Knight, who played at Oklahoma and Texas A&M. Christian Hackenberg is the QB in Memphis and Mike Martz is the head coach for the San Diego Fleet.

2. This is a [insert fire emoji] quote from LeBron and he's 100% right.

3. Speaking of LeBron, wouldn't you love to know what these two guys said to each other last night? And how about Bill's jacket. Looks like he was paying homage to Craig Sager.

4. Everyone has thoughts on the big Jeff Bezos/National Enquirer story, including the Honey Badger. 

5. MLB is changing the "disabled list" to the "injured list" and some people are upset, so I just want to say that you have to be a special kind of crazy to let something like this bother you an any way, shape or form.

6. The man who broke the story about ESPN firing Baseball Tonight host Adnan Virk, New York Post sports media reporter Andrew Marchand, joined the latest SI Media Podcast to give all the details on the wild story. Marchand explains how ESPN found out about Virk reportedly leaking information to Awful Announcing and why they decided to fire him instead of suspend him.

You can listen to the podcast below or download it on iTunes.

7. THE ROCK VIDEO OF THE DAY: There's nothing better than a Rock Concert.

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Catch up on past editions of Traina Thoughts here and check out the Sports Illustarted Media Podcast hosted by Jimmy Traina here. You can also follow Jimmy on Twitter here.

IN CLOSING: When will people learn that trade deadlines hardly ever live up to the hype?

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Jimmy Traina
JIMMY TRAINA

Jimmy Traina is a staff writer and podcast host for Sports Illustrated. A 20-year veteran in the industry, he’s been covering the sports media landscape for seven years and writes a daily column, Traina Thoughts. Traina has hosted the Sports Illustrated Media Podcast since 2018, a show known for interviews with some of the most important and powerful people in sports media. He also was the creator and writer of SI’s Hot Clicks feature from 2007 to '13.

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