A Letter from the CEO

The Bleachers Are the Blueprint

A letter from the CEO on the next four months, and why they matter more than most people realize.

There is a sound you can hear right now, on almost any evening in America, from now until Thanksgiving weekend.

It's a marching band tuning up in a high school parking lot. It's a Friday-night PA announcer testing a microphone. It's a whistle blowing at a middle school practice field two hours before the ninth-grade game. It's a mom folding a camping chair into a trunk and asking her son if he grabbed the seat cushions. It's a father showing up at a Saturday-morning youth game with a coffee that has already gone cold because he stopped to fill up the truck.

That sound is the largest, most durable football audience in this country. Not the NFL. Not major college. Something bigger than both of them combined — the people who show up in person, week after week, to watch football in the places they live.

We are about to spend the next four months in front of them.

I want to write to you today about why that matters. Why the fall of 2026 — this specific fall, this specific window, before our second season of the Continental Football League kicks off in the summer of 2027 — is the most important stretch of calendar we are going to have between now and the day our stadiums fill.

The Math Nobody Talks About

These are our people. They already love this game.

Roughly a million young men played high school football in the United States last fall. Roughly three and a half million more played the sport at some level before high school — youth leagues, flag, junior high, Pop Warner, the small-town league where the coach also runs the hardware store. Every one of those players brings, on average, four to six people to the games — parents, siblings, grandparents, uncles, cousins, neighbors. Do the math on any Friday night in September. You are looking at more Americans in the stands, in the aggregate, than any single National Football League Sunday will draw all season.

Those are our people.

They are already football fans. They already spend their evenings and weekends in bleachers. They already know the difference between a good coach and a bad one. They already have opinions about the tight end, the punt team, the offensive line, and the guy on the chain gang. They live for this sport. The Continental Football League does not have to convince them to love football. They already do.

The only thing we have to do is meet them where they are.

Case Study · One Weekend in the Permian Basin

Let me get specific. Real numbers. Real market. One CoFL club.

I want to walk you through a single weekend in one CoFL market, using real numbers, because I think when you see them laid out you will understand why I am writing this letter.

The Tall City Black & Gold play out of Midland, Texas. Within a ninety-minute drive of Midland — call it the market our club can actually reach — you have two of the largest and most storied high school football audiences in the United States. And beneath them, you have layers.

The two crown-jewel high school venues, side by side.

Ratliff Stadium in Odessa seats 17,931, with standing-room capacity pushing toward 19,500. It is the stadium the book Friday Night Lights was written about. Home to Permian High and Odessa High. When those two teams play each other, the stadium sells out — nearly eighteen thousand people in one venue for one high school game (Discover Odessa). In a typical Permian home game against a district opponent, published reporting has put average attendance around 15,000.

Astound Broadband Stadium in Midland — the venue our own city built, formerly Grande Communications Stadium — seats 15,000, with a total capacity of 18,000 when the grass berm fills (Wikipedia). Home to Midland High and Midland Legacy. The annual crosstown rivalry between the two Midland schools regularly fills that building. Even a mid-season district game routinely draws thousands.

That is four public high schools sharing two of the biggest high school football stadiums in the state. Now add Midland Christian, the private school on the north side of town, playing in TAPPS at Gordon Awtry Field, capacity around 4,000. Add the eight-plus public high schools within the ninety-minute radius outside Midland-Odessa — Big Spring, Andrews, Monahans, Fort Stockton, Seminole, Greenwood, and the smaller Class 3A and 4A programs that fill their home bleachers every Friday night.

Now add the layers under it.

Every one of those varsity games has a marching band. Permian's “Pride of Permian” MOJO Band alone runs well over a hundred and fifty students. Every band has parents, band boosters, and a bus that follows them to away games. That is not a marketing sidebar — that is a captive audience of families with disposable income who plan their entire fall weekends around a football schedule.

Every varsity game has a cheer squad, a dance team, a drill team, and a ROTC color guard. Every one of those programs has its own set of parents in the stands.

Every Thursday night, the junior high and freshman teams play — and Midland ISD and Ector County ISD run football at every one of their middle school campuses. Between the two districts, that is more than a dozen junior high football teams playing every week, in front of their own parents and grandparents. Add another 3,000 to 6,000 people on a Thursday night, spread across the county.

Every Saturday morning, the Permian Basin Youth Football League takes the field. PBYFL has been running since 2011 as a non-profit, serving ages 4 through 11 in tackle football and up to age 15 in cheer. The Pow5r Sports League runs 7-on-7 across the Midland-Odessa metro. Between those two organizations, and the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Permian Basin — which serves more than 4,500 kids a year — you are looking at another few thousand kids and their families on any given Saturday.

The Arithmetic

Here is where it gets interesting.

Tall City plays its home games at Astound Broadband Stadium — the same building that hosts Midland High and Midland Legacy on Friday nights. Fifteen thousand seats. Eighteen thousand with the berm. In 2027 the Black & Gold will play four home games there — one premier season opener and three league dates, played on Saturday or Sunday depending on stadium availability, in the summer window when the high school schedule is dark.

So do the arithmetic honestly.

To fill our seated bowl for a single Tall City home game, we need fifteen thousand people. The weekend football audience within our ninety-minute radius runs, conservatively, between forty thousand and sixty thousand. Call the midpoint fifty thousand. Fifteen thousand out of fifty thousand is thirty percent. One in three.

We do not need a fraction of a percent. We do not need a marketing miracle. We need one out of every three Permian Basin football families — the ones already in the bleachers on a Friday, already at their kid's peewee game on Saturday, already loading up the RV for the away game two counties over — to come to one Tall City game in a summer. One out of three. Once a season. In the same building where they already watch football.

The Vision · What They Show Up To

Now picture what that one out of three shows up to.

Think about what the Savannah Bananas built around a baseball game. Now put a real professional football game at the center of it. That is what a Tall City Saturday night looks like when we do this right. Not a game with some extras. An event that happens to have a real Continental Football League game inside it — with real stakes, real standings, and real players from your own town on the field.

That is what one in three of the Permian Basin's football families will come to see. Once a summer. In a building they already know.

That is a conversion problem that can be solved by being present, being known, and being trusted. And the only way to be present, known, and trusted in a football community like the Permian Basin is to be there year-round — not to parachute in during the summer.

Year-Round in the Community

The People's League Playbook

That is what our clubs will spend the next four months, and then the four months after that, doing.

That is the People's League playbook. We are not the NFL flying in on a Sunday. We are not major college showing up for the recruiting weekend and disappearing. We are the professional football that lives in the community, year-round, in the same schools and on the same fields where our future fans and future players already are.

One out of three. Fifteen thousand people. Four Saturdays or Sundays in the summer of 2027. That is not a marketing pitch. That is the arithmetic of the market we already live in — and the operating standard every one of our clubs will hold themselves to between now and then.

The Window in Front of Us

Our clubs are ready to be seen.

What is different about this fall, compared to any other stretch of calendar this league has had, is that our clubs are ready to be seen. Every one of them now has a brand identity, a coaching staff, a front office, a website, a set of colors, a social presence, and the operational bandwidth to plant a flag in the towns where their future fans already spend their Friday nights. Indianapolis has a head coach the city already knows. Our Texas clubs have a summer under their belts. Our expansion markets have logos before they have stadiums, and that is deliberate — a logo travels.

We are not selling anything this fall. We are introducing ourselves.

What I'm Asking of You

Go to a football game this fall.

If you are reading this, you are already invested in what the Continental Football League is trying to build. I want to ask you for one thing.

Go to a football game this fall.

If you have a kid who plays, you're already going. If you don't, go anyway. Go to a Friday-night high school game in your town. Go to a Saturday-morning peewee game at the community park. Go to a small-college game at the state school forty miles down the road. Bring the family. Bring a hat. Bring twenty dollars for the concession stand — they need it more than we do.

And if you see a CoFL logo in the stands, or on a coach, or on a booth by the gate, come say hello. That is one of us. We are trying to introduce ourselves to your community, and the best introduction in football is the one that happens face to face, in the same bleachers where the game is being played.

The next four months are the ones that make the next four years possible.

We're going to spend them the right way.

See you in the stands.

Follow The League

Wherever you get your football, we're there.

THE CONTINENTAL · THE PEOPLE'S LEAGUE

Continental Football League · Indianapolis, Indiana

coflfootball.com  ·  [email protected]