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.
Atta Baby, Scott! Pitch those teams in California! We want’em!