I am a football fan.

More specifically, I am an SEC football fan. My version of the

Super Bowl is Georgia and Alabama meeting in a playoff game with everything on the line, everybody in the house yelling at the television and somebody wondering why the dog has gone into the other room.

So when professional indoor football came to Rome twenty years ago, I went.

And I remember the Rome Renegades bouncing people off the walls at The Forum.

That was not a figure of speech.

Arena football puts the action practically in your lap. The field is smaller, the game is faster and those padded walls along the sidelines are part boundary, part obstacle and occasionally part tackling dummy. Buy the right seat and you weren't merely watching professional football. You were close enough to wonder whether your nachos needed a helmet.

The Renegades were coached by David Humphreys, who happened to be my old Sunday School teacher and was already a familiar name to football fans throughout Northwest Georgia. Humphreys had coached the Rome Wolves and other area high school football programs before taking the reins of Rome's professional team.

And the Renegades were good.

Really good.

They reached the playoffs in their first Rome season and, in 2006, went all the way to the league championship game. Rome had a winning professional football team playing right in the middle of downtown.

Then, almost as quickly as they had arrived, they were gone.

The Rome Renegades had hit The Wall.

And this time I don't mean the padded one.

Owner Harry Pierce announced after the 2006 season that the franchise would cease operations. The problem wasn't what happened on the football field. The problem was what happened at the ticket window.

Pierce said The Forum's limited seating and parking made it difficult to generate enough revenue to make professional sports financially sustainable. He believed Rome needed a larger multipurpose arena, but with no new facility expected anytime soon, continuing to absorb the losses simply didn't make financial sense.

Think about that for a minute.

The Renegades didn't disappear because they couldn't win.

They disappeared after a championship-caliber season because winning football games and winning the business game turned out to be two very different things.

Now, twenty years later, somebody is walking back into the same building and taking another swing.

The Rome Red Cats were officially introduced September 8 and are scheduled to begin play at the Forum River Center in April 2027 as members of the American Arena League. The ownership group includes Kacee Smith, Richard Maslia and head coach and co-owner James Moreland. The team expects to play four to six home games, with tickets projected in the very fan-friendly $10 to $20 range.

Smith specifically remembers the Renegades. He says he was a fan.

So he knows Rome has seen this movie before.

The difference is that this time the new cat in town is red — although anybody who has ever owned a ginger cat knows they tend to arrive with a little confidence, a little attitude and absolutely no concern for what happened to the furniture before they got there.

The Red Cats are also entering a very different sports-business world than Harry Pierce faced in 2006.

Livestreaming can extend the audience far beyond the number of people who fit inside The Forum. Upgraded video boards create additional advertising inventory. Social media gives a small-market franchise direct access to thousands of potential fans. Sponsorship packages can now include digital exposure that barely existed when the Renegades were playing.

And perhaps expectations are different too.

The Renegades were trying to prove professional football belonged in Rome.

The Red Cats don't have to prove that.

The Renegades already did.

They put a winning team on the field, filled The Forum with noise and gave Rome two seasons of professional football that a lot of us still remember.

What they could not figure out was how to make the numbers work.

That is the question hanging over the Red Cats.

Not whether Romans will watch football.

We will.

Good grief, around here we'll watch two SEC teams play a meaningless September game and spend three days arguing about the offensive coordinator.

The question is whether today's combination of affordable tickets, sponsorships, streaming, digital advertising and a more modern entertainment model can overcome the same limitations that Harry Pierce identified twenty years ago.

Because the Rome Red Cats aren't really starting from scratch.

They're walking onto a field where another Rome team once came within one game of a championship.

And somewhere in the shadows of The Forum, you can almost hear those Renegades hitting that wall one more time.