Minor league indoor football is (somewhat) famous for how poorly run some of the teams are.
They might not have matching uniforms, or the bills don’t get paid, and most of the time those teams are at the bottom of the standings and will fold after the season.
But Champions Indoor Football had one of these delightful stories shakeout this past weekend by a team that was in first place, and appeared to be set to lock up the overall top-seed for the upcoming CIF playoffs.
Heading into this weekend, the final weekend of the regular season, the Dodge City Law were sitting at 9-2, leading the South Division by a game over the Amarillo Venom, when suddenly on the CIF site appeared a story headlined, “Champions Indoor Football Issues Penalties to Member Team.”
Now, upon seeing that headline you might think that it would be something minor, maybe a fine and on probation, nothing major that would shake up the entire league’s standings and playoffs.
You would be wrong.
The Champions Indoor Football league board of directors has imposed penalties against the Dodge City Law football team as result of them not following and adhering to the league operations manual and guidelines with regards to uploading video. As a result, the Dodge City Law will be stripped of two victories and thus changing their overall record from 9-2 to 7-4 heading into the final week of the regular season. The victories taken away from Dodge City’s record will not be awarded to any other CIF team nor will their teams record be changed.
Talk about your Friday evening news dump. “Oh yeah, the team with the best record in the league is in trouble and we’re going to take away two wins from them because of it, and now the playoff situation is crazy.”
The league commissioner, Ricky Bertz, even offered up his thoughts on the situation in that post linked to above:
“While this situation was unfortunate and no one in the CIF including the Dodge City Law wanted this to be the final outcome, the board of directors decided that this was what was best for the league given the circumstances and how they related to all team members involved. With a desire to maintain consistency on determining tiebreakers within the CIF, in the event that there is a situation where head to head games and strength of schedule are needed to determine who advances, the wins that where forfeited from Dodge City will still be used in the calculations”.
Making this story even more bizarre, aside from the fact that it was done by a team in first place, is that it happened in CIF, which is far and away the second best minor league indoor football league in the country and is somewhat immune to these types of happenings.
To make matters even worse for the Law, they dropped their final game of the regular season to the Duke City (Albuquerque, NM) to fall to 7-5 on the year, creating a four-way tie for the final two playoff spots in the South Division, and allowing the Amarillo Venom to swoop in with the league’s top overall record and home-field advantage throughout the playoffs.
Here are the final standings:
So to sum up, Dodge City went from sitting pretty and possibly the best record in the league, to 7-5, taking three losses on the same weekend, and needing a series of tiebreakers to sneak into the playoffs with the No. 3 seed. They will travel to Allen, Texas now to take on the Texas Revolution, who might be the most talented team in the league, at least in terms of the number of Division 1 and former NFL players on the roster.
So yeah, you or your favorite team might have had a rough weekend, but at least you didn’t take three losses in the span of one day, then go from first overall to needing tiebreakers to sneak into the playoffs and a game against who might be the toughest team in the league.
Minor league indoor football, the gift that keeps on giving.
HOT SPROTS TAKES 