The year 2000 brought a heightened interest in the AFL after Kurt Warner, who spent three years as quarterback of the AFL's Iowa Barnstormers, rose to fame as starting quarterback for The Greatest Show on Turf, the Super Bowl-winning offense of the then-St. Louis Rams.
The TNN deal coincided with the league's emergence as one with a major presence on the North American continent.
Major markets such as Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, and Los Angeles, each of which had lacked franchises for many years, returned to the league, it received its first and only franchise in Canada (the Toronto Phantoms), and teams in smaller markets such as Albany and Iowa were relocated.
Included in the deal for the league was the right to broadcast the ArenaCup, the championship for the newly established arenafootball2, conceived as a minor league for metropolitan areas too small to support arena football as a major sport.
TNN itself was moving away from live sports, at the time transitioning to a network named Spike TV.