Ghost of a chance

Sometimes, you see something coming yet still can't believe it when it happens. The Bandits were supposed to travel to Asheville, NC to play the Ghostriders this Saturday, but after the latest chapter in that franchise's comically haphazard and inept history, there will be no game.

Long-time Bandits fans will remember that the Carolina Sharks were one of the original franchises and the Bandits' scheduled opponent for Opening Day last year. But just two days before the game, the team was disbanded then re-created as a league-owned team called the Ghostriders. They played an all-road schedule and didn't win a single game, often losing by 50 or more points. Even in indoor football, that's a lot. After the season, we were promised that the AIFL would find a good owner, not to mention a home arena, for the 2006 campaign. And to their credit, the league did keep the team viable and hired personnel to keep it running. They had coaches, a GM, and players in place, and a lease with an arena in Asheville, before selling the team to one Rob Boyd. Then this season -- and the fun -- started. Still unable to win a game, the Ghosties at least played a home game, but a few minutes after it ended, Boyd fired the coach and hired Jim Terry, whose entire AIFL experience, the same die-hard Bandits fans will recall, consisted of missing four of 10 extra points in that inaugural game against the Ghostriders. Then two days later, the owner fired his GM, then filed a police report alleging that he'd embezzled money and defaulted on some bills.

As crazy as events to that point had been, it was not the first time we'd seen it in the AIFL. Coaches come and go everywhere in the minor leagues, and there were a couple of incidents last year in other cities with unpaid bills, unpaid players, and broken promises. However, with Boyd and Terry still in place and ostensibly dedicated to making the team work, it seemed that the Ghostriders would be able to survive. Except that for the last two weeks, Boyd had been trying quietly to get rid of the team because he didn't want to be responsible for the debts and ill will all over Asheville. According to an e-mail from Boyd, he tried to sell the team back to the league but "could not reach an agreement." Finally, today the AIFL suspended the Ghostriders' season and put all the blame on Boyd! Further distancing itself from Boyd and other Ghostriders staff, the league created a new traveling team called the Ghostchasers which will be distinct from the 0-4 and defunct Ghostriders.

There is plenty of blame to go around here. Whether or not former GM David Dix embezzled any money, he was working for the Ghostriders when he made the deals with local businesses. Boyd may have been right to fire him, but showed poor judgment in passing the buck -- literally -- for those debts to Dix himself. Boyd also clearly has little patience, business sense, or both in desiring to dump the team after four games. It's one thing to shut down a business, but do it like a man and don't make all your creditors take it up with the police. Surely he had to know that as the owner of any minor league team, let alone one with the history of the Ghostriders, there would be some difficult times and he'd have to pay some bills. The league should have been more diligent in screening Boyd as a potential owner in the first place and made it clear to him that they would not bail him out. It may be for legal reasons that they had to change the name to the even more ridiculous Ghostchasers (the same legalities that saw the name Ghostriders emerge in the first place), but when has any expansion team in any league joined play in the middle of a season?

The Sharks/Ghostriders/Ghostchasers did everything exactly wrong from day 1, and amazingly it's only now that anybody else will be affected. Teams that had a road game scheduled at Asheville will now play only 13 games this season. The AIFL has experienced a number of embarrassing situations, some of them completely preventable, and has always come up with "solutions" at or after the last minute. Up and canceling the last two games of last season and starting the season without a rulebook and adding or making up rules as needed are two good examples. I am positive that A-Haines is praying that there is enough separation between the 14-game teams and the 13-game teams that the one extra game doesn't make any difference in playoff qualifications (whatever those end up being -- we, of course, have not heard word one on this year's playoff structure). He brought 10 new teams on board this year and has been quoted as saying he wants to get upwards of 50 teams in the league. Five of the new teams, not to mention the Bandits themselves, could be affected by the Ghostchasers incident and might be totally turned off by however Haines ends up handling it. That is not the way to attract dozens of new cities and owners to your league.

So now the Bandits will be the only team not playing this weekend, which sucks because they finally looked like the champions of last year in Monday's beatdown of Raleigh, and I had hoped that they would sustain that fire through the short week and the next game. Instead, we're off until April 9. All the scheduled home games will still be played, and if the last contest was any indication, they will be a whole hell of a lot of fun!