Small but hearty: Salt Lake football fans embrace Stallions in new team's inaugural home game

SALT LAKE CITY — As soon as the Alliance of American Football announced a franchise in Salt Lake City led by former Utah co-offensive coordinator Dennis Erickson, a handful of football fans clamored for more.

Jason Wild was one of them.

The Salt Lake resident put down a deposit on season tickets once the franchise that would become the Salt Lake Stallions began taking them, and he ordered a jersey from Starter once the company began selling them.

So when the Stallions made their debut Saturday afternoon at Rice-Eccles Stadium, he wasn’t going to miss it for anything.

Not 30-degree, overcast weather. Not a less-than-packed house. Not even a less-than-perfect tailgating scene or parking situation.

Wild was there, jersey and all, as the Stallions faced the Arizona Hotshots for the second time in the first three weeks of the eight-team Alliance of American Football.

You could call Wild a "Stallions original."

“I love the NFL, but I know we’ll never get a team here,” Wild told KSL.com prior to the start of Salt Lake’s game to the Hotshots. “If this is as close as we get, I want to be in on the ground floor.”

Wild isn’t the only one. The Stallions announced a crowd of 10,641, but an awful lot of those came dressed in invisible ponchos.

Still, Salt Lake's newest pro sports team is grateful for any fans it can get.

"This town is a great football town," Erickson said after the team's 23-15 win over Arizona. "Once we get this thing going, we'll start getting a lot of fans in here."

Zachary Steed is a football fan. But he’s a Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan and doesn’t follow the college game — despite living in Utah.

So when a few friends mentioned the Stallions — Salt Lake’s latest iteration of professional football, but an outdoor team unlike the now-defunct Utah Blaze and since-departed Salt Lake Screaming Eagles — he was on board.

Football? In February? With a few friends, marking both sports and a social outing?

Yeah, he was in.

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Steed said. “These leagues sometimes don’t stick around as long as we would like. But my hope is that we can get a good, reliable fanbase around here. I think we’ll come down again, as a group; this could definitely be a mainstay.”

The Stallions moved to 1-2 after Saturday's win, handing the Hotshots their first loss of the season and gaining a measure of revenge for their own loss on the AAF's opening weekend. As they’re building up a fan base, they’re also building on the field and jelling together as a team.

That’s pretty clear from a team that spent the first two weeks of the season in an extended training camp in San Antonio and opened with back-to-back road games.

But the Alliance might not be a team that comes and goes by night. Sure, former upstart pro football leagues have risen and fallen in a brief span — but those marketing themselves as competitors to the NFL.

The AAF isn’t one of those leagues. The February-April spring schedule forces the teams to be done in time for the NFL draft, and co-founder Charlie Ebersol has been adamant about his teams being developmental, or feeder, teams for larger organizations. He even told players after league-wide training camp in Texas that his job was to make sure they all sign NFL contracts in a year, or maybe two.

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Stallions get first win in franchise history

Josh Woodrum threw for 178 yards and a touchdown to lead Salt Lake to a 23-15 win over the Arizona Hotshots for the team’s first victory in franchise history.

That’s the intent of the Alliance — to be a true minor-league football system.

And while it’s not the NFL, it just raised an extra $250 million in investment from Carolina Hurricanes owner and CEO Tom Dundon, who became the league’s executive chairman with the cash infusion.

So neither is this league the XFL — the former Donald Trump-bred football league that folded after one season but is restarting in time for a 2020 season.

“I feel like the league got rolling before they were ready because they wanted to get in front of the XFL,” Wild said. “But they’ve got great talent on the field, and the games have been exciting.

“There were a couple of lopsided games, but they never had a preseason, either. They’re figuring it out right now, and I think it will turn into some great football if we give it some time.”

A lot of the fans recognized that talent at Rice-Eccles Stadium.

Steve Leatham is a longtime season ticket-holder for the Utes, and he remembers watching the likes of linebackers Trevor Reilly and Gionni Paul, as well as the 20 other former BYU, Utah and Utah State players on the roster.

Saturday was a day to relive and support the careers of the college players he’s been watching for a while — as well as connect with his 7-year-old son Jaxon.

“It’s fun to see them play at this level now — as well as some of the other players who had some time in the NFL,” Leatham said.

“I wanted to come out and support it. I want this to last and to see football year-round.”

The game ended before 4 p.m., just under three hours after the announced start time of 1 p.m. MST — which was good for those who braved the cold weather of Salt Lake City for a February outdoor football game.

That’s another positive for the league and the Stallions. With a television contract that includes CBS Sports Network, the NFL Network and Bleacher Report Live, there’s little need for extra timeouts and media breaks of the average 4.5-hour football game that most people enjoy in their living rooms.

“I’m looking forward to this type of football without all the TV timeouts and the extras,” Leatham said. “They just play football and play the game. I hope it lasts, I hope the Stallions do well, and it’s a good chance to come out and bring Jaxon to see football.”

The Stallions will face “The Old Ball Coach” Steve Spurrier and the Orlando Apollos next week in the team’s second home game, which may bring back some fans and may chase away others, based on the play, the stadium, or a host of reasons as individualized as the fans walking through the east gates at Rice-Eccles.

But Wild will be one of those fans to come back. And he’ll bring a friend, even if it means watching a few growing pains in the process.

“We’re Salt Lake City,” he said. “We don’t necessarily have the best feeder schools coming in here. I like the U. and I like BYU, but they aren’t the bigger schools.

“We’re probably going to take a little time to jell as a team.”

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