Tombstone
Born: December 2017 – NAL expansion franchise
Folded: February 5, 2019
First Game: April 7, 2018 (L 51-24 @ Massachusetts Pirates)
Last Game: August 5, 2019 (W 43-36 vs. Jacksonville Sharks)
NAL Championships: None
Arena
Cross Insurance Arena
Opened: 1977
Branding
Dance Team: The Tuskhers
Team Colors:
Ownership
Owners: National Sports Ventures (Richard Maslia & Rob Storm)
Attendance
Background
There’s as many small-market indoor football promotions as there are craft brewed IPAs these days. It would be insane to try and keep track of them all. The National Arena League is one such effort, formed in 2016 with one renegade club from the once-prominent Arena Football League (the Jacksonville Sharks) and several small market refugees from a defunct collective known as American Indoor Football.
The NAL launched in 2017 with eight far flung teams from Pennsylvania in the north all the way to Texas and Monterrey, Mexico. Five of the clubs folded during or following the NAL’s 2017 debut season and it has since re-tooled as a six-team circuit exclusively on the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. For the league’s second season in 2018, it moved into New England with a pair of expansion teams in Portland, Maine and Worcester, Massachusetts.
The Maine Mammoths got off to a brutal 1-7 start in 2018. But a late surge saw the club finish 7-8 under Head Coach James Fuller. The team’s box office fortunes were weak, as each of the Mammoths’ eight home dates at Cross Insurance Arena in downtown Portland drew a smaller crowd than its predecessor. The Mammoths averaged 2,019 fans per game for the 2018 season.
Extinction
Ownership problems sunk the Mammoths two months before their second season would have kicked off. The team was owned by National Sports Ventures, an out-of-state group that also co-owned the NAL’s Carolina Cobras club and was heavily intertwined in the league’s overall leadership. National Sports Ventures principals Richard Maslia and Rob Storm placed the team up for sale seeking to court local ownership in late 2018. When no viable buyers surfaced by late winter, they suspended operations of the Maine Mammoths on February 5th, 2019.
Trivia
Quoth the Mammoth, nevermore: the Mammoths featured a receiver named Edgar Allan Poe, Jr. who led the team with 82 receptions in 2018.
Maine Mammoths Video
WPXT broadcast of the Mammoths vs. the Jacksonville Sharks at Cross Insurance Arena, August 5th, 2018. This turned out to be the team’s final game.
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