Major League Football: Quants Just Want To Have Fun

So am I crazy? I picked up some Major League Football ($MLFB) on Friday.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It’s completely nuts. I’m a guy who is into data, who screen, who ranks. With $MLFB, I don’t have to worry about the company’s fundamentals because, drum roll, it doesn’t have any fundamentals. It’s just an idea, but a really really cool idea. I’m, a pro football owner! Eat my dust Jerry Jones.

For those not in the know, which is probably just about everybody, this is a newly formed spring pro football league that will focus on secondary markets, cities that don’t now have pro sports.

The elements of this publicly-owned league (which owns all the teams) are summarized in Figures 1 and 2 below, which are screenshots taken from the company’s web site .

Will it work? Who knows? The NFL definitely needs some sort of pro development league. MLB and the NHL have their minor leagues. The NBA has its D-League. The NFL has, nothing. There is arena football but the game may be too different to serve as a development league. And we another draft season approaches, with Combines in full force, we know there are a heck of a lot of players who are potentially successful pros who will wash out for no reason other than the wrong team with the wrong system at the wrong time.

The downside is that the track record of success so far is, if you round to the nearest whole digit, zero! Clearly, an investment in $MLFB should be only in a taxable account (there’s no use wasting a perfectly good capital loss deduction in something like an I.R.A.).

Maybe I can make a trading case for this. The league is drafting and gearing up for its Spring 2016 debut: or, maybe not.

The only thing certain here is that even the most discipline rules-based investors need to have fun every now and then; and Playboy Enterprises (now private) is so yesterday, while strip-club operator RCI Hospitality ($RICK) is priced at a level that actually requires one to put on one’s work hat and do some legitimate analysis. 

OK. It's a work day. Back to my models . . . .