The good news for pro football fans is that there are plenty of new pro football leagues in the works.  The bad news is that not many of these new leagues seem to be all that close to actually, you know, playing pro football.

The AAFL crashed and burned while still in the hangar.  The UFL is lingering, but we sense that the plan to attempt to raid the bottom of NFL rosters and then use them to compete with it is misguided, to say the least.

Now there’s the UNFL, which actually could work because it is positioning itself to fill the vacuum created by the scuttling of NFL Europa. 

“I tell everyone that there’s one professional football league, and that’s the National Football League,” UNFL founder Marvin Tomlin told the New York Times.  “But in the same place, the [NFL] does not have a developmental system.”

The UNFL plans to play from January to April in college stadiums, starting in 2009.  And that’s where a good idea would begin to skid off the rails.

The best plan would be to create a true minor league with teams in cities that don’t have NFL teams playing during football season.  The rosters would consist of players with ties to specific NFL teams, who could be called up and sent down, just like in baseball.  Games would be played on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, giving us seven days per week of pro or college football.

This way, young players would be able to develop via game reps, just like they did in Europe.  At first, the teams could be clustered in the same relative geographic area, in order to hold down travel costs while the league gets the wobble out of its legs.

And cities that served as incubators for the NFL in its infancy should get first dibs on hosting one of the minor-league franchises.  Places like Akron, Dayton, Muncie, Evansville, Rochester, Louisville, Toledo, Duluth, Canton, Pottsville would have plenty of built-in intrigue.

We like it.  If only someone with the money, time, skills, and desire would get off their selfish, lazy ass and do it.