SIOUX CITY - Even as team officials lamented the resignation of Coach Jarrod DeGeorgia, Sioux City Bandits indoor football owner Bob Scott said he wasn't pleased with how the Indoor Football League has functioned.

DeGeorgia, who set every major Bandit passing record prior to a two-year coaching stint, announced he was leaving coaching for a business job with Paul Davis Restoration in Sioux City. He said the departure was an emotional time, since football has been much of his life, which included quarterbacking the Wayne State (Neb.) College team.

DeGeorgia particularly enjoyed his six-year tenure with the Bandits as a player and coach since the creation of the team in 2001.

"I am a Bandit, I will always be a Bandit," he said.

In his pass-happy 62-game Bandit quarterbacking career, DeGeorgia had 752 completions in 1,389 attempts, threw for 8,615 yards and 147 touchdowns.

Scott said DeGeorgia first approached him about the business opportunity two weeks ago. He and DeGeorgia said there was no organizational pressure for DeGeorgia to resign.

"I was not fired, I was not asked to resign. This was by my choice," DeGeorgia said.

With a wife and young kids for DeGeorgia to support, the Paul Davis position was a better career choice than coaching an indoor football team, Scott said.

The Bandits had an 8-21 record in DeGeorgia's tenure. DeGeorgia said that won-loss record was "not anything to be proud of," but he was proud of how the coaching staff worked hard to get the most out of players.

"The last couple of years have been a little bit frustrating," Scott said. "We just didn't have the personnel to compete the last few years."

In discussing the timeline of when DeGeorgia's successor will be hired, Scott moved to a topic for which he acknowledged the league might fine him. He lambasted Indoor Football League officials for not enforcing league rules on maximum payment levels for players and practice times.

"Those (teams) that played by the rules, we were very competitive (with)," Scott said.

"Those that didn't play by the rules, at the end of the season quite frankly we were very competitive with them. We made strides the last six or seven games, we were a pretty good football team, playing by the rules with teams that weren't."

Continued Scott, "If there is a rulebook, we ought to honor that rulebook … I am disappointed in my (fellow league) partners, and I'll probably get fined by the league for saying that. But that's OK, because somebody needs to step up and question what this league is about and when we are finally going to get people to be in compliance with salaries, with practice schedules, with all these things that we all know happened this year that shouldn't have happened."

He cited an unspecified team that began practice too early for the 2009 season.

"We had a team without workers comp(ensation), putting huge exposures of liabilities on the other teams," Scott said.

IFL Commissioner Tommy Benizio announced April 25 the league changed the Sioux Falls Storm's first five victories to losses and levied a $10,000 fine as part of discipline for noncompliance with workers' compensation regulations. Storm owner Colin Steen called that "outrageously harsh punitive measures, imposed by a majority vote of IFL team owners… intended to place the Sioux Falls Storm and its players at a competitive disadvantage against the other teams."

Said Steen, "This mistake, related to worker's compensation, was corrected prior to our sixth game. All of our players' medical bills are fully covered by the team and no harm resulted to the players or any other team."

Until the Aug. 28 league meetings are concluded and he knows whether the IFL will be a league with teeth on rules, Scott said it would be premature to name a new coach. He said he hopes to keep the Bandits in the IFL, since it has so many regional teams, but Scott said it was possible other options for an indoor football league could be pursued.

"Either we get people who play by the rules and do it right, or we're gonna have to look at a different place to play football," he said.

"In indoor football, you can't have a (high-payroll, high-achieving) Yankees and the (low-performing, low-salary) Pittsburgh Pirates. You can't have that, because it just doesn't allow for the continuation of indoor football. Everybody has got to have competitive on a Saturday night and everybody has got to play by those rules."

Bandit Coaching History

2001: 4-10 record, Phil Karpuk (four games), Carl Reinhardt

2002: 9-5 Carl Reinhardt

2003: 6-8 Carl Reinhardt

2004: 8-7 Art Haege (eight games), Ervin Bryson (seven games)

2005: 15-3 Jose Jefferson

2006: 6-10 Jose Jefferson

2007: 3-12 Richard Britt (one game), Roger Jansen (nine games), Tom Luxford/Pat Arens (five games)

2008: 4-11 Jarrod DeGeorgia

2009: 4-10 Jarrod DeGeorgia