Month: February 2024

Anytime the subject of spring pro football comes up, a lot of us – me included – tend to look at the original United States Football League as the measuring stick for longevity.

The late, great USFL made it three seasons before being laid to rest, so now we wonder if any new endeavor can match that modest run.

But we tend to overlook the World League of American Football, which morphed into NFL Europe (and NFL Europa over its final season).

True, it only had a domestic element for two seasons before going on hiatus and then reforming as an all-European circuit. But it played 15 seasons in all, helped propel guys like Jake Delhomme, Kurt Warner, Brad Johnson and Adam Vinatieri to successful NFL careers, and was a quality Triple A league.

So … how did it last a decade and a half?

Because the NFL allowed it to.

WLAF/NFL Europe/NFL Europa was reportedly losing $30 million per year. Once the NFL established its international footprint, league officials decided a better use of its resources was to become a global sport itself instead of funding a developmental league.

So, fans in England who once cheered on the minor league London Monarchs now get multiple NFL games in their backyard each season.

My point here is that making spring pro football sustainable is going to be difficult. Growing a TV audience that comes back year after year, putting butts in the seats … it’s a tough job. It’ll take a serious, long-term commitment from people who realize any real profit isn’t possible until many years down the road.

Daryl Johnston, director of football operations for the United Football League, thinks the UFL has that commitment.

Fox owned the modern USFL and RedBird Capital funded XFL 3.0, and the product of their merger is this new league set to begin play on March 30.

“What makes this the most opportune chance for a spring football league to have sustainability? We’re doing it the right way and getting the key pieces all together,” Johnston said during a visit to Birmingham last week. “This isn’t one plus one equals two, this is one plus one equals three and half, maybe four, because of the assets we have available to us right now, without a doubt.

“Taking all the pieces from the USFL and the XFL and putting them into the UFL elevates us to such a strong position. This gives us a better chance going into our opening weekend of any other league in the last 40 years.”

Johnston is well-aware of the pitfalls of spring upstarts.

He was general manager of the San Antonio Commanders of the Alliance of American Football, a league that failed to finish its lone season in 2019.

A year later he was director of player personnel for the XFL’s Dallas Renegades. The third reboot of that spring endeavor looked promising until the COVID-19 pandemic shut it down.

“I was in the Alliance of American Football, and of course finances were the big thing,” Johnston explained. “The XFL in 2020 was kind of similar. We had the pandemic, of course, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but we had that single entity where you’re the only one writing the checks. And what we got from Fox in the USFL was the commitment for three years right out of the gate.”

The USFL used a single hub model in 2022 and had four base camps in 2023.

The XFL utilized a hybrid-hub in 2023, keeping weekly operations at a single site before moving to home cities for weekend games. That will be adopted for the 2024 UFL season, with Choctaw Stadum in Arlington, Texas, serving as host.

Although I understood the reasoning behind it, I was no fan of the USFL approach. Branding teams “New Jersey” and “Pittsburgh” but having them all work and play in Birmingham just seemed … I don’t know, disingenuous. Midway through the inaugural season my interest waned because while the product was solid an empty stadium (except when the hometown Birmingham Stallions played) was off-putting to me.

Year two was an improvement but still not good, although I got back on board as a fan because alt-football is my porn. And I started watching the XFL around March after getting over my NFL hangover.

“When I was with the AAF we brought everybody to San Antonio to train and (head of football operations) Bill Polian told me we should’ve stayed there,” Johnston said. “Year one in Birmingham allowed us to get our feet underneath us, but let’s face it – Birmingham had 10 home games and nobody else had any home games, so you wanted to engage in more communities going forward. So, we expanded to four hubs but still, there was one team in each hub who didn’t have a home game and in the case of Canton, which had the New Jersey Generals and Pittsburgh Maulers, neither had home games.”

The XFL template is much better, but community engagement faces major hurdles – except in Arlington. Flying into a host city on Friday and playing on Saturday and Sunday doesn’t allow school, hospital and community visits during the week.

“We’ll spend a week in the Arlington area getting all the work done, then we’ll go out on the road,” Johnston said. “That’s going to be our biggest challenge and that’s what we talked about with the Birmingham fans last year. We all exhaled and patted ourselves on the back after the first year, but we should have stayed engaged with the Birmingham community year-round.

“We have to be engaged with all the fan bases, and that’s something we have to figure out because in all eight markets we won’t be there during the week and that’s something the guys enjoyed when they were here.”

Johnson added that Birmingham was pitched as a hub for the former USFL teams in 2024, but in the end, it didn’t make economic sense.

“We did push for a USFL Conference hub in Birmingham and XFL Conference hub in Arlington, but the costs of two hubs would’ve been substantial,” he said. “Arlington had a few more things going for it on a greater scale that were more attractive, like flying out of DFW (Dallas Fort Worth International Airport). It just came down to budget.”

There are a lot of things I wish would happen sooner than later in the UFL.

I’d love to see aggressive expansion, especially to places like San Diego and Oakland – which no longer have NFL franchises and have no prospects of getting them in the foreseeable future.

Placing teams in major markets in the northeast is important, too; a league of eight with three clubs in Texas seems more regional than national in scope.

And more than anything, there’s a need for local ownership of franchises to help teams weave into the fabric of their communities.

But I get that this is a marathon and not a sprint, and it’s easy to suggest how to spend money when that money isn’t mine.

And since Johnston has already been down this road several times, I’m going to trust him and the UFL founders to do things right – however long it might take.

A month after leading the Birmingham Stallions to their second consecutive United States Football League championship, Skip Holtz was hired as special assistant to the head coach at Northwestern University.

If I’m being honest, I thought that was likely the end of his reign in Birmingham. Sure, he said it wouldn’t affect his spring job, but how could it not?

I mean, he’d coached 273 college games to only 24 in the USFL, and I figured that ol’ Fall Saturday muscle memory might be too hard to ignore. He certainly had nothing left to prove in spring pro football.

Fortunately for Stallions fans, I was wrong.

“One of the things when we first started negotiations was if it was going to be a permanent position,” said Holtz, who has made a couple of recent stops at Protective Stadium where his old team will play in a new circuit – the United Football League – this spring. “Immediately, I said I have a job in February that I’m not gonna miss. I want to be back … this is where I want to be.”

In a football sense, Birmingham is now the only place where Holtz wants to hang his hat. And the way he sees it, there’s always something to prove.

“I’ve had opportunities to leave and go interview for other college head coaching jobs, but I’ve turned jobs down because I love the job that I have,” he said. “We’ve had the opportunity to win two championships and now we have the opportunity to roll our sleeves up and see if we can’t win another. Every year it’s a new team.”

As you know, the UFL is the result of a merger between the USFL and XFL. Birmingham was one of four USFL teams to survive the blend, and will now compete with the Arlington Renegades, D.C. Defenders, Houston Roughnecks, Memphis Showboats, Michigan Panthers, San Antonio Brahmas and St. Louis Battlehawks.

I thought the quality of play in both organizations was very good in 2023, and will be much, much better in 2024 thanks to consolidation. As Holtz has already said, with two leagues of eight teams last year, there were 800 players on rosters. This time, that number will be culled to 400.

Just because the NFL is at the top of the pro football pyramid doesn’t mean the rest of the structure is hollow.

There’s plenty of room for Triple-A ball.

“It’s like (part owner of the UFL Dwayne Johnson) talks about in the Player 54 documentary, if you have a roster of 53 players the 54^th had nowhere to go and nowhere to play,” Holtz said. “You might be this close to making a roster, but you’re out. The UFL gives these young me the opportunity to continue to chase their dream and have an opportunity to make it into the NFL.

“That’s what these leagues are all about. It’s for entertainment, certainly, but it’s also for opportunity. You see these guys play here in our own backyard, guys like Brandon Aubrey and Alex McGough and Davion Davis … and then you see them make an NFL roster. That’s the reward.”

And that’s what brings Holtz back to the Magic City for another season. And the success he’s achieved and fun he’s having means the Stallions will have his undivided attention going forward.

“Northwestern was an incredible experience,” he explained. “To go to a place where they were 1-11 and to help a program that had just lost their head coach and help a bunch of coaches and players who were looking for answers win eight games and go to a bowl game and beat Utah was incredible.

“But that’s a lot of football in a year … I don’t think I’ll be doing anything this fall. And if my wife has anything to say about it, I know I won’t be doing anything this fall.”

Considering my relationship with alternative football – one that dates back to 1974 and the World Football League – I’ve become used to seeing leagues and teams come and go. Over time, I became more of an interested observer than a rabid fan.

But Holtz’s enthusiasm is contagious, making me want to go all-in on the UFL.

“I have had probably as much fun coaching in 35 years as I ever have coaching in Birmingham with the Stallions,” he said. “With the relationships with the players, the community, the fan base … it’s just been a very rewarding experience for me.”

Spring football’s history is defined by derailment, but you know what? Maybe – just maybe – it’s finally on the right track.

I’m just glad Skip Holtz is along for the ride.

United Football League executive vice president of football operations Daryl Johnston has worked with the Alliance of American Football, XFL 2.0, and the modern United States Football League. That means he’s seen the good, the bad and the ugly of alternative football leagues.

Those experiences and his wealth of gridiron knowledge position him well in helping the UFL embark on its maiden voyage. But now the hard work begins – attempting to make professional spring football sustainable for the long haul.

“The biggest thing is who is supporting us on the financial side,” explained the UFL executive, who – along with Birmingham Stallions head coach Skip Holtz – talked to the media earlier on Thursday before taking part in a meet-and-greet with fans at Protective Stadium. “We all know what Fox brought to the table with the USFL … football built Fox Sports. We knew they were committed to professional football and they were also able to help in areas where we could reduce our costs.

“On the (XFL) side, they had great support from RedBird Capital, and when you talk about the ability to market and promote, I don’t think you can have anyone better than Dwayne Johnson and Dany Garcia. They’re the face and the voice of your league.”

After seeing the USFL through two seasons, Johnston explained how the merger with that league and the XFL came about.

“I was alerted to it in late summer, about six weeks into the process,” Johnston said. “Everybody up top had to figure out this was something that could happen before bringing everybody else in. The hardest part for us was staying on two parallel tracks in case it didn’t go through.

“So, while we were making arrangements for the potential merger, we were also focused on season three (of the USFL) in case this falls apart in the 24^th hour. And the leagues did things differently, so we had to try to find common ground and blend best practices.”

Holtz said he started hearing rumors not long after his Stallions wrapped up their second consecutive USFL championship.

“After we won the championship everybody kind of dispersed, and I got a phone call and was told (a merger was a possibility),” Holtz said. “And of course, I had a chance to work for Northwestern starting in August, but even then, I was still trying to follow the calendar and see what was going on.”

The two leagues conducted business quite differently. The USFL was TV first, and its hub model (all eight teams in Birmingham in 2022 and teams housed in Birmingham, Memphis, Detroit and Canton in 2023) often resulted in extremely low attendance when fans didn’t have a “home team” rooting interest.

The XFL’s hybrid hub had players on all eight of its teams live and train in Arlington, Texas, during the week, and travel to host cities for games.

The hybrid hub will be used in year one of the UFL.

“It was hard,” Johnston said about the change. “You get close to people, and we had to let a lot of good people go. But the good news is there’s a merger, we retained some very good people, and it gives us the best opportunity for success long-term. The bad news is we found out there’d be attrition across the board, going from what was two leagues of eight teams each to one league with eight teams, and those were difficult decisions to make.”

The original USFL didn’t reach the level of the National Football League, but it was close enough during its three-year run from 1983-85. It featured multiple Heisman Trophy winners and several future Hall of Famers – and wasn’t afraid of raiding the NFL for talent. In fact, by the time it played its final season, a handful of its teams could’ve likely been competitive in the senior circuit.

But since then, springs have been devoted to developmental circuits, from the World League of American Football to three incarnations of the XFL, the AAF, and the 2022-23 USFL that was designed to send players to the big league, not take them away.

Birmingham, the Houston Roughnecks, Memphis Showboats and Michigan Panthers make up the USFL Conference of the UFL, with the Arlington Renegades, D.C. Defenders, San Antonio Brahmas and St. Louis Battlehawks representing the XFL Conference.

The Stallions and Renegades – defending champions of their “old” leagues, will lift the lid on the UFL on March 30 at Choctaw Stadium (noon CDT, Fox).

St. Louis and Michigan wrap up the Saturday doubleheader at Ford Field at 3 p.m. on Fox.

On Sunday, March 31, D.C. and San Antonio square off at the Alamodome (11 a.m., ESPN) and Memphis meets Houston at Rice Stadium (2 p.m., ESPN).

“I really like how we kind of get to preserve the history of both leagues because we have the USFL and XFL conferences,” Holtz said. “We’ll play everybody in our division twice and we’ll play everybody from the XFL Conference once. So that’s gonna be exciting.”

Johnston said the USFL and XFL competition will live on in the joint venture.

“We’re proud of what we did in the USFL, and they should be proud of what they did in season one of the XFL,” Johnston said. “But these coaches and players are competitive, and at the end of the season whichever team from the old league wins the championship, they’re gonna brag about it.”

Each club plays a 10-game schedule, meaning there’ll be 40 regular season contests, two conference title games and the UFL Championship, which will be played Sunday, June 16.

All games will be televised on either Fox, ABC, ESPN, ESPN 2 or FS1.

“The competition is going to be much better,” Holtz said. “We’re going from 800 players playing spring football to 400 playing spring football, so every team is going to be better. For so long when it came to spring football, people had one foot in and one foot out, not knowing if it would survive.

“I think when you look at everybody involved in the UFL, this has a chance to grow and get really strong.”