The 2019 Arena Football League season was the 32nd and final season in the history of the
Arena Football League
The Arena Football League (AFL) was a professional arena football league in the United States. It was founded in 1986, but played its first official games in the 1987 season, making it the third longest-running professional football league in ...
(AFL). Prior to the start of the season, the league expanded from four to six teams with two added expansion teams. The 12-game regular season began on April 26 and ended on July 21.
League business
Teams
For the first time since
2011
File:2011 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: a protester partaking in Occupy Wall Street heralds the beginning of the Occupy movement; protests against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed that October; a young man celebrate ...
, the AFL entered the season with more teams than it had the previous season, adding an
expansion team
An expansion team is a new team in a sports league, usually from a city that has not hosted a team in that league before, formed with the intention of satisfying the demand for a local team from a population in a new area. Sporting leagues also ...
and reactivating another that had been dormant for over a decade.
The league announced the
Atlantic City Blackjacks
The Atlantic City Blackjacks were a professional arena football team based in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that played in the Arena Football League (AFL) in 2019.
History
Home games were played at Boardwalk Hall. The team was operated by Trifecta ...
expansion team on January 22, 2019, that is operated by the same ownership group as the Albany Empire. On February 7, 2019, the league re-added the
Columbus Destroyers
The Columbus Destroyers were an Arena Football League (AFL) team based in Columbus, Ohio, with home games in Nationwide Arena. The team was founded in as the Buffalo Destroyers, based in Buffalo, New York, and relocated to Columbus in . They fold ...
as another expansion team to bring the league back to six teams.
Schedule and playoff changes
The 2019 season consisted of a 13-week schedule during which each team played 12 games and had one bye week.
At the end of the regular season, the top four teams participated in the
ArenaBowl playoffs, in which the top seed faced the fourth seed while the second seed faced the third seed in a home-and-home series. The team in each series with the
highest aggregate score advanced to the ArenaBowl. If the aggregate score in either series was tied after the second game in the home-and-home semifinals, the game would have continued in the AFL's standard overtime format. While the semifinals consisted of two games in each pairing, ArenaBowl XXXII was still one game.
Closure
The AFL announced it had closed its teams' local operations on October 29, following that with a
Chapter 7 bankruptcy
Chapter 7 of Title 11 of the United States Code (Bankruptcy Code) governs the process of liquidation under the bankruptcy laws of the United States, in contrast to Chapters 11 and 13, which govern the process of ''reorganization'' of a debtor. ...
liquidation filing November 27.
Final season standings
- clinched regular season title
- clinched playoff berth
Playoffs
Semifinals
''All times listed are in
EDT.''
ArenaBowl XXXII
Attendance
Announced attendance figures for each home game. In the weekly columns, dashes (—) indicate away games or a bye week, while bold font indicates the highest attendance of each team.
Awards
All–Arena teams
First team
Second team
References
{{2019 Arena Football League