A good minor league for football would be pretty expensive, just considering travel. If you're traveling with 40 guys (the realistic minimum that you could take

A good minor league for football would be pretty expensive, just considering travel. If you're traveling with 40 guys (the realistic minimum that you could take to field a team), that gets expensive pretty fast. A true minor league could probably work if the NFL teams agreed to subsidize it, and they put it in a single major metro area. Like, the NFL has a 4 team minor league in Dallas, and did a lot of community marketing, played on high school fields, etc. You could build a single gym/practice facility, and the teams could rotate around in it. The problems are that you start to get into affiliation issues (what major teams are affiliated with what minor teams, and what does a major team do when it wants to send down a CB, but there are no teams that play man press with open slots for a CB?) and the fact that football is much, much more a team game than baseball or basketball, and most players need a couple weeks in the system to really make an impact, whereas a baseball player can get traded from one team to another with minimal adjustment, and a skilled basketball player won't need much more time. The other issue is that there already is a sort of minor league, it's called the practice squad. And if you have minor leagues, the practice squad guys are in a weird limbo, because they are not getting game reps like they would in a minor league, yet they are the guys just good enough to almost be NFL players who would benefit the least from game reps, because of the work they are putting in with the full team. There are actually many minor football leagues, most playing indoor football, and those guys almost never make it to the NFL. For the NFL, the real solution isn't a minor league, it's doubling the practice squad. That could cost each team about... (using numbers from the article) $1.5 million, and that's probably the best solution if the powers-that-be really feel there is a talent gap.