[82lsju]

Separately...I don't see the NFL establishing a minor league outside of Universities.  The unholy agreement between the NCAA and the NFL seems to be working well.  The NCAA has pretend students that are actually professional football players.  At some schools, 1% of the football players will play in the NFL, the rest will fail to use their degrees.  The NFL doesn't have to actually pay for a minor league football team, unlike the NFL.  This is key, because SEC attendance and attendance at other large land grant schools, plus their media deals deliver an inordinate amount of revenue.  A true minor league would have minimal attendance, something like the NBA's G League, which averages 1/7th of an average NBA game's attendance, and would be of limited value for media purposes.  Acceptable for the small rosters of a basketball team, but insufficient for the of immense proportions roster of a football team.

I would agree, the rookie pipeline is I think to big for an NFL "minor league", given it looks to be +/-263 players a year (and more if you include practice squad players)

Overall, 246 rookies in 2020 were named to Week 1 rosters — about 17 less than average.

https://operations.nfl.com/gameday/analy...1-rosters/

if you had NFL minor league teams with 53 players and 20% of them went to the NFL each year you would need ~25 teams.  I would guess that most players on these teams who joined out of high school would need to be on the minor league teams for at least 2 years to physically develop enough to compete in the NFL

Even if half of the rookie pipeline was still from college players you would still need ~12 NFL minor league teams...

[82lsju]

Separately...I don't see the NFL establishing a minor league outside of Universities.  The unholy agreement between the NCAA and the NFL seems to be working well.  The NCAA has pretend students that are actually professional football players.  At some schools, 1% of the football players will play in the NFL, the rest will fail to use their degrees.  The NFL doesn't have to actually pay for a minor league football team, unlike the NFL.  This is key, because SEC attendance and attendance at other large land grant schools, plus their media deals deliver an inordinate amount of revenue.  A true minor league would have minimal attendance, something like the NBA's G League, which averages 1/7th of an average NBA game's attendance, and would be of limited value for media purposes.  Acceptable for the small rosters of a basketball team, but insufficient for the of immense proportions roster of a football team.

I would agree, the rookie pipeline is I think to big for an NFL "minor league", given it looks to be +/-263 players a year (and more if you include practice squad players)

Overall, 246 rookies in 2020 were named to Week 1 rosters — about 17 less than average.

https://operations.nfl.com/gameday/analy...1-rosters/

if you had NFL minor league teams with 53 players and 20% of them went to the NFL each year you would need ~25 teams.  I would guess that most players on these teams who joined out of high school would need to be on the minor league teams for at least 2 years to physically develop enough to compete in the NFL

Even if half of the rookie pipeline was still from college players you would still need ~12 NFL minor league teams...