Emory Mckenzie
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi, I am Emory Mckenzie, I will be your host today. I recently completed my masters in Geosciences at Rice University, and I went to Georgia Southern University for my undergrad where I also played football.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Brian Cooper, the president of the American Flag Football League. I was curious about the vision for flag football, which is now an Olympic sport.

So, join me in our conversation about Brian’s career, his vision for flag football, and how the sport has expanded its reach internationally. Enjoy listening!

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Brian Michael Cooper
I went to undergrad at Cornell. And then after college I worked on Capitol Hill for about a year and then I went back to school into the joint degree at the Kennedy School at Harvard and Columbia Law School, and then stayed in New York for 10 years. And then my wife and I moved to Houston in 2002.

Emory
Were you doing sports law in New York?

Brian
Yeah, I started at Proskauer. When I started out, I was working on matters for the NBA and ATP tour, NHL and Major League Soccer. And at the time, Major League Soccer had a relatively large antitrust lawsuit with the Major League Soccer players associations, case called Frazier versus MLS, which really was a seminal case on determining whether or not a league could serve as a single entity which would shield it in some capacities from antitrust sanction. And so, I worked on that and really enjoyed it. Proskauer is nationally known for its sports practice. Then I continued to represent sports clients as an agent. And then we came down to Houston, started a firm called Haynes and Boone and did that for about six years where I was doing non-sports work and sports work as well. Around 2008 got an opportunity to become president of the NBA G league Rio Grande Valley Vipers, then I was at Rice as a Senior Associate Athletic Director and CFO, and then I was director of sports programming at Dish Network in Denver. And then, after being more of an executive for about 10 years, I moved back into private practice as a partner at Lewis Brisbois, big L.A. firm, and led their sports and entertainment efforts there. And then went to the XFL, became president of the Houston Roughnecks. We had a pretty successful start and then obviously, we were hit with COVID really knocked out most of live sports and I became a partner at Frost Brown Todd in the Houston office and led the sports and entertainment efforts and also was a leader of our venture capital practice as well, so I worked with startup companies as a transactional lawyer.

Emory
What a career, that didn’t stop there.

Brian
Yeah, and then in June of 2023, I left Frost Brown to take the leap again into sports. I’ve been president of two teams, never been president of a league. I was really excited about the opportunity to help the American Flag Football League kind of achieve what they were really hoping to do, which is really expand this game. And I think that the upside of the league is just fantastic. So, I am just really excited to make that leap.

Emory
Yeah, it’s gonna be an exciting future for flag football.

Brian
Absolutely, absolutely.

Emory
How did that opportunity come about?

Brian
I had been talking with the founder, Jeff Lewis, I met him in 2021, when I was at Frost Brown, and really was pitching him as a lawyer, you know, the legal work. We just kind of struck up a conversation, we both went to Cornell. So, we had a kind of a commonality in our alma mater, and kind of started having the conversations and about a year into it, he was talking about restarting the league as a professional league. The league had been operating previously, more so like a tournament league, where you had groups of amateur players all come together, and they play for a tournament and ultimately play to the championship, whether there’s some sort of maybe a cash prize at the end. And that’s how the AFL initially was built. It was built in a way where you also had a group of amateurs going up against a group of retired pros. And that kind of Pros versus Joes format, was used in 2017, and 2018. And in 2018, they had a game here in Houston, at what’s now known as Shell Energy Stadium, and really was a great success. They had about 8000 fans at the game, NFL Network was the broadcaster for those games and also in 2017. And then they were able to, to kind of continue that momentum. And then just like every other league in 2020, live sports were just crushed by the pandemic, and they had to suspend operations for a bit but then restarted. That’s about that time when I got to know Jeff and I started talking about the professional league. We just kind of had those conversations and they continued on and ultimately, I got more enthused about being able to see how they could really build it out and was excited to kind of help them with that step.

Emory
So now is there like a season for flag football?

Brian
This is really gonna be our inaugural season of a men’s professional league. Unlike the previous iterations of the AFFL, this league is a professional league. And so, a little bit of backstory about how the AFFL works and flag football. We logistically work with a traditional football field, it’s seven on seven. The field is a traditional field 120 yards. So you know, 100 yards to 10 yard endzone. But the games are seven on seven, which is essentially like traditional football. The only people that are missing are the two guards and two tackles. So, it’s more like watching a skeleton drill in football, or just the simple seven on seven that you also do in traditional football. The teams have 12 active players and three practice squad players. So, there’ll be 15 players on each team. And the players will be paid. Players are making anywhere between $20 to $25,000, for the time that they’ll play in our league, which is a modest salary, but it’s one that’s competitive, like the arena League, for example, is slightly less than what the players will make in the UFL. We’ve got teams in Dallas, Boston, Las Vegas, and Nashville. And so, we’ll be in those markets. We’ll have home games in each of the markets. We’ve got tickets already on sale. Still talking to a couple of prospective media partners for broadcast, but we expect to have our games broadcast nationally. We launch late April of 24. So, we expect this inaugural season to be our good season.

Emory
So, one thing that does make me excited about this is that the flag football league sounds very similar to seven on seven and seven on seven leagues are becoming a bigger thing amongst high school players.

Brian
They very much are. They very much are. I mean it’s really impressive. One of the things I love about flag football, there are many things, but one major thing is what I call the personality of it. And I mean, it’s kind of a, you know, kind of using the word not necessarily the right tone, but I mean, the personal nature of the game, sort of like NBA, you know, in soccer where you can, unlike traditional football, with helmets and pads, these players won’t have helmets and pads, so you can see them. You can see their faces. You can see the talk between the players, you know, you can see the great highlights, and that’s what I think is interesting on seven on seven and the overtime highlights in those seven, seven games, because you can see a player go up for a great catch, and you know, then that becomes a viral moment. And that player is pretty recognizable. So, I think you know, we’re gonna have that same, hopefully that same, push as well, where we can really highlight the great athleticism of our players and do it in a way that are similar where we can take advantage of social media and viral videos. We’ve got a real pretty robust right now Instagram following of about 128,000 people at this point and part of that has been built on the flag community being able to see people that they know and really enjoy watching in those, like in short form content and on those videos.

Emory
That’s great. Big personality is a great word to use, you can see a lot more personality amongst the players.

Brian
Yeah, yeah, it’s amazing. You know, NBA really bottled that maybe 30 years ago and Commissioner Stern, it really leaned into highlighting the Magic and Byrd and Michael Jordan in showing like, hey, you know, really kind of putting the focus more on players and having people get to know them. And I think that’s what we’re planning on doing with our team as well as our players. You know, getting to know them, right, getting to see those, kind of backstories, and where they came from and how they’ve developed. Those are hopefully gonna resonate with fans and people who are already interested in the sport and getting interested in the sport.

Emory
So, is there a clear distinction between an amateur sport versus a professional sport?

Brian
Yeah, I think the clearest distinction is I mean, you know, I teach a sports law class at U of H as well, just yesterday, we are in first class, we talked about the difference, you know, the amateurism, so I would just say no, the clearest form is that amateurs generally pay to play, right? They pay the fee to the tournaments, they pay to play in youth leagues, and a pro gets paid to play. That’s kind of the distinction between our past league, the tournament style league, where players paid to kind of have an entry fee to be in a tournament that ultimately may lead to a cash prize, but they weren’t professionals. Our players have signed contracts and are professional players under our league, and they’re subject to the same standards and contract terms as a pro player, you know, as a pro football player or pro baseball player where, you know, particularly like, as a professional, you’ve got additional responsibilities to your team and to the league. So you can not engage in, you know, dangerous behavior, or dangerous activities because you need to protect yourself because you are now being paid to play the sport. Yes. And there are certain nice distinctions there but really the key one, is that, you know, it’s really the salary and being subjected to a contract.

Emory
So the talent pool for these teams, is there a draft?

Brian
We didn’t have a formal draft this year, but we did have formal tryouts in all four markets. We had about 400 players show up. About a 100 in each market over the summer,

Emory
A market, you mean the areas like the…

Brian
Yeah, sorry, the markets in the four cities, our 4 AFFL cities. We started off and had our first tryout in Dallas, and then we moved to Nashville, and then Boston and Las Vegas. And in each market, about 100 players were there. And ultimately, that group of 400 got narrowed down to 32. And 32 were initially offered core team contracts, eight in each team. And within those 32 players, 11 of them have United States national flag football team experience. And so, we’ve got nearly the most elite flag football players on the planet playing in our league, including probably the most recognizable name in flag football is a player named Darrell Doucette, who goes by, his nickname is Housh. And Housh is a legend in the sport. He is the starting quarterback for the United States flag football team. He’s the quarterback of the Las Vegas team. He’s not a big guy, about 5′ 7”, 140 pounds, but he is really one of the finer football players. You know, his ability to evade tackles to his speed. It’s all really amazing. He really distinguished himself back in the 2018 game, where he caught Lavelle Hawkins, a former NFL wide receiver, right at the goal line and Lavelle had maybe about a 20 to 25 yard head start on Housh, and Housh closed the gap and caught him. And you can see that video on YouTube. NFL films did a seven-minute documentary on the flag football game in Houston, the 2018 ultimate final in Houston. And it’s really amazing to watch. It happens in about a five-minute mark. And it is really again one of the more astounding plays I’ve ever seen.

Emory
So how did flag football become an Olympic sport?

Brian
I think this has been a decade’s long group effort by many entities, including, you know, Jeff, and the American Flag Football League. The NFL, you know, has been a huge proponent of flag football for the last 10 years through Troy Evans and in his team. They’ve really worked hard to expand flag football at the youth level, at the prep level over the last 10-15 years. Initially, I think there was concern about the safety of the traditional game and that people were looking at flag football as an alternative to that sport. But I think ultimately what has really been more interesting is that it’s just developed into a greater affinity for the sport of football in general. And so what you really have seen is flag football expanding to youth, flag football expanding internationally, and most importantly, flag football expanding to women’s sport. You’re seeing a lot more women’s prep football in various states like Massachusetts and Nevada, Tennessee, where they’ve now made it a varsity sport in many states. I think that the world and the IOC and the USOC recognized the emerging strength of the sport. And its inclusion in the Olympics is just going to be fantastic.

I think everybody will get to see it that anyone can play it. I mean, what’s also great about it is that you can have a pickup game in your backyard and really enjoy it but then you see it at an elite level and it’s just so dynamic. Being able to see the athleticism and just the playmaking there’s just so many components to the game that I think ultimately flag football has the ability to really expand that, that, I was gonna say narrative but that’s not really the expand that kind of joy and the feeling internationally. I think as people see the game, they’re gonna really respond to it. And I think being in the Olympics is a great way for that to happen.

Emory
Yeah, I know for a lot of American families, flag football is like a staple for the say Thanksgiving dinner, like after dinner. Put together a flag football team, and they get to just enjoy a game with their family. So, what is the international reach for flag football?

Brian
I think the upside is incredible. Right now, about 20 million people worldwide are now playing it. The game continues to grow in leaps and bounds. I think we added about 7 million people in the last 10 years alone, it’s really taking off. I think, internationally, you see it in Central and South America. I had the pleasure of going to USA Football sanctioned tournament last summer in Charlotte, and there were teams from Brazil and Colombia, and Japan. And that was really amazing. We had couple of players from Japan come over and try out for our league. During the summer, we had a young man from Great Britain, who came over to try out, and one person from Germany. So, I think it’s like basketball and soccer. Since that is easy to pick up, it’s easy to play, it lends itself to incredible expansion. Just like you’ve seen with the soccer and basketball has grown globally in amazing ways over the last 30 years, I think that in flag football has a significant chance of doing a similar thing over the next few decades internationally.

Emory
This makes me excited for flag football’s future.

Brian
Yeah, I think you know, the excitement level to me is that just being able to see at youth level and watching young people really get excited about the sport. Now kids have numerous opportunities at the prep level to continue to play football through middle school, through high school. I think people may have thought, well, flag football is sport for smaller kids, and what happens, you know, when they get older, but they continue to play flag football, and they continue to love the sport and grow with the sport. And that’s one of the greater upsides of the sport going forward is this ability to have people be part of it for years. I think we’re extending that timetable. People now can look at it say, hey, not only can I play in high school, but perhaps I can play in college, and ultimately, I can play this game professionally. And that is a huge boost for any sport, you know, your ability to continue to play it at the most elite level. I mean, look at Esports. Esports allowed players who were skilled players at various games to continue to play and play it either in college and play professionally. That’s a big moment for our sport, and shows its reach both socially and geographically.

Emory
Yeah. I started playing football when I was five and ended up playing in college. And one of the big things you hear when you’re in college playing football is once this is over, you don’t get another chance to play football in the same. But the the way you do get that feeling of football back in that competitive feeling of football, is through flag football.

Brian
Yeah, I think so that’s what it makes people to relate to the game, right? You can continue to play in the game, and it allows you to keep maintain that affinity for the game.

I’ll tell you one other thing that’s going to be important with our league as well as is that on building out any kind of entity and league, the fan engagement is very important. I’m always cognizant of how teams relate to the community, and I want to make sure our league does the same thing where we have a very reciprocal relationship with our communities, meaning we are out supporting the communities in the same sense that the community will be supporting us.

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Emory
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Flag football is often the introduction to the game of football for kids so it’s exciting to hear of its growth. Brian’s story has consistently involved sports, so it was a pleasure to hear of the opportunities that sports have created for Brian. For me, this entire interview created excitement for the future of one of my favorite pastimes.

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