One of my favorite things about minor league indoor football isn’t so much the quality of play or seeing former D1 players slum it out in those leagues, but the crazy stories that come with these leagues.

The players make very little money, leagues fold and form up every year, teams fold, move, or re-open every year, and with it comes a lot of crazy stories.

One of my favorites was a team who paid its coach one cent on his last paycheck. Another was a quarterback from San Jose State traveling to the midwest and signing with two teams, only to learn that both had folded once he got there.

Today, I have a great rumor that I really want to be true. And I stress, ***THIS IS ONLY A RUMOR***, and I have no real proof of this being true.

So last night was the first game for the Monterrey Steel of the National Arena League, a brand new league that has a handful of really solid minor league indoor football markets. They were getting ready to play the Corpus Christi Rage, with the game set to be broadcast free on YouTube.

Only the game never showed up on YouTube, which led to people in the site’s chat discussing their issues with the league and teams so far. I kept this chat open to see if anybody had any real info on if and when the game might start.

One of the commentors in the chat, which has since been deleted and closed by the league because it got pretty nasty in there, claimed his dad was a player for the Corpus Christi Rage.

He claims that his dad is one of the few players who the team originally signed, and that in the week leading up to the Rage’s first game last night, that 22 players had quit the team. 

I repeat, in a league with 25-man rosters, this person claimed that 22 players had quit the team in the week leading up to the first game.

Now, I have searched high and low on message boards, newspaper sites and any other place I can think of trying to find any sort of confirmation of this rumor, or other people who may have heard it as well, but turned up nothing.

Yet, I still think it could be true because in the first game last night Monterrey walloped the Rage 55-12, which certainly looks like a replacement player type of score.

Again, this is all rumor, but one that given minor league indoor football’s less than stable past, could be entirely true.

As for the first minor league indoor football game in Monterrey, Mexico, it looks like it went pretty well! Here’s a shot of the crowd last night from their local paper.

That same paper (and my sketchy Google translate) claims that the crowd was over 6,000, and then later in the same article said it was over 8,000. So let’s split the difference and say it was 7,000. All in all, aside from the streaming issues for those of us wanting to watch the game on YouTube, it looks like a strong start for minor league indoor football in Mexico.