Category: Alternative Football

The United Football League will return for its second season in March of 2025, marking modern professional spring football’s fourth consecutive year of operation. And earlier this week, it announced plans to grow.

On Monday, the UFL began accepting proposals from cities interested in being part of the league, which was born of a merger of the USFL and XFL. The organization currently has eight clubs – the Arlington Renegades, Birmingham Stallions, D.C. Defenders, Houston Roughnecks, Memphis Showboats, Michigan Panthers, San Antonio Brahmas and St. Louis Battlehawks.

They’ll all live and train in Arlington again next spring while playing games in their respective markets.

“As the UFL lays the groundwork for future growth, we’re excited to begin exploring new markets for expansion, where spring football can not only live, but thrive,” UFL President and CEO Russ Brandon said in a statement. “These expansion efforts validate our vision and early success, demonstrating how spring football resonates with fans and reinforcing our commitment to broadening its reach.

“With the strength and structure of our ownership group, along with our media partners, we are well-positioned for the long haul and look forward to identifying communities that have the potential, and desire, to host a UFL team.”

According to the release, the UFL is “looking at several core attributes when selecting its new cities, including fan interest and existing sports culture, geography and population and venue and infrastructure availability.”

The UFL had solid television ratings in 2024, exceeding those of the 2023 USFL and XFL by more than 30 percent. And the quality of play was good enough to see 60 percent of its players get NFL workouts, 78 earn training camp invites and 21 make the 53-man roster on opening day.

As an unofficial farm system of the NFL, the UFL is making its mark.

However, attendance issues are hindering its goal to be a sustainable “major” minor league.

The Battlehawks were far and away the box office champions of the UFL’s inaugural season, drawing 171,825 fans over five games for a 34,365 per game average. After that, however, there was a steep drop-off.

DC was second best with 14,143 fans per game, followed by San Antonio (11,888), Birmingham (10,255), Arlington (9,887), Michigan (8,134), Houston (7,056) and Memphis (6,893).

So even without expansion, the league has some work to do when it comes putting butts in the seats.

And that begs the question … what is a “good” average crowd for this kind of league? When considering that, it’s best to take St. Louis out of the conversation. This is an NFL town without an NFL team, and fans there are making sure the next owner with wandering eyes looks toward the “Gateway to the West.”

But if you go strictly by average, the UFL stacks up pretty well compared to other second-tier leagues.

In AAA baseball in 2024, the top draw was the Lehigh Valley IronPigs (8,866 per game), while 5,687 fans, on average, showed up for games in the International and Pacific Coast leagues.

In the American Hockey League, the Cleveland Monsters led the way with 10,264 patrons per contest (5,920 was the league average).

The NBA G League welcomed 1,640 customers per night in 2023-24, and the Iowa Wolves boasted the highest average attendance at 4,148.

And United Soccer League Championship contests drew 5,324 per match this season, with Sacramento Republic FC topping all clubs with a 10,101 average.

Still, football is a different animal, and each UFL team has only five regular season home dates (San Antonio will host just four in 2025 due to scheduling conflicts at the Alamodome). Minor league baseball (75), basketball (25), hockey (27) and soccer (17) have many more home dates than the UFL, and reasonable ticket prices would suggest that each team averaging at least 15,000 per game seems reasonable.

So, where to next?

One beef I have with the UFL in its present form is the fact that three of its eight teams are in Texas. When almost half your clubs are in located one state, that gives the entire organization a regional feel.

If the UFL wants to continue to dip into the branding history of the XFL/USFL, Oakland would be a logical expansion choice. Fans in the Bay Area are burned by the loss of the Raiders, so a new  version of the Invaders could be a hit.

And it’s never a bad idea to have the top market in the country – New York – in your league. The New York/New Jersey Hitmen of the original XFL (2001) was second in the league in attendance with 28,309 per game.

Plus, they had a cool logo and blue, black and silver color scheme.

Alt-football insider Mike Mitchell – who has been ahead of the curve on spring football news since the USFL started play in 2022 – reported this week that the plan is to add two teams in 2026 (one for both the XFL and USFL conferences) and two more for 2027.

If that’s the case and I got to pick, I’d add the Hitmen to the XFL Division in 2026 and put the Invaders on the USFL side.

And although San Diego never had a team in any iteration of those leagues, the fact that it lost its NFL franchise would make it highly desirable going forward.

Ultimately – and maybe most importantly – I think the UFL needs to cut the cord on its hybrid-hub model if it ever wants any market to truly embrace it.

I understand the cost-cutting aspect, but teams need to work as well as play in a town if they really want to be considered part of that town.

At any rate, the 2025 UFL season kicks off on March 28, 2025, with a 10-week regular season schedule. That slate will be followed by two conference title games and the UFL Championship Game on June 14.

Here’s hoping the TV ratings continue to be good and more paying customers squeeze through the turnstiles. The United Football League is worth keeping around.

Talk of any new football league always gets my Spidey senses tingling, and six years ago they were set off by the birth of the Freedom Football League.

Ricky Williams, the Heisman Trophy winner out of Texas and a veteran of 12 NFL seasons, announced the creation of the FFL on an episode of ESPN’s Outside the Lines program.

“The purpose of this league is about community and the development of players,” Williams said during the December 6, 2018 broadcast. “In thinking about creating this league, I wanted to create a league that I could have stayed in and been comfortable and really thrived. The NFL started a long time ago, and since then a lot of things have changed. And we want to create a league that’s ready for that change and invite some more of it.”

I’d long been a fan a Williams, a tremendous athlete who is also an intellectual. And he’s a guy who cheerfully marches to the beat of his own drummer. Having him out front of this new venture made me interested.

What interested me even more was that 10 teams – complete with nicknames – had already been identified.

Set to begin play in the spring of 2019 were the Birmingham Kings, Connecticut Underground, Florida Strong, Oakland Panthers, Ohio Players, Oklahoma City Power, Portland Progress, San Diego Warriors, St. Louis Independence, and Texas Revolution. No players, owners, staffs or stadiums had been lined up, but hey – those were just details, right?

Terrell Owens and Simeon Rice were also involved with the FFL’s formation, and Byron Chamberlain, Jeff Garcia and Dexter Jackson were among the 100 stakeholders.

The idea was that the league would not only be a showcase for players’ talent, but a platform for their viewpoints as well. It was formed two years after San Francisco 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick – who protested police brutality and racial injustice by kneeling during the playing of the national anthem – was basically blackballed by NFL owners.

The first FFL press release stated that the circuit was founded on four philosophical and operational pillars:

1. Ensuring players receive permanent and reliable holistic health and wellness support on and off the field, seeking to avoid physical and financial exploitation that is commonplace in both collegiate and professional football today.

2. Amplifying the voices of athletes by relentlessly pursuing unity and encouraging athletes to address society’s challenges relating to social justice, wealth disparity, health and wellness and more hot-button issues they are passionate about.

3. Reimagining the game for fans by creating a new spectator experience that leverages technology and embraces innovation, while simultaneously eliminating price-gouging to make loyalty and game-attendance affordable again.

4. Establishing economic justice via financial incentives through joint ownership and further eliminating financial exploitation and profiteering to the benefit of the few at the expense of many.

“The Freedom Football League is the perfect integration of my passion for social justice, economic equality and health and wellness, with my life-long dedication and love for professional football,” Williams said. “As much as I’d like to throw on the pads and play, this league is designed to bring competitive football back to the masses, providing players and fans alike with the economic benefits of owning stake in a team, while also ensuring players are empowered to use their public platform for social good.”

Player/public ownership and the green light to speak out on social justice were noble ideas, but details on the football-side of the FFL were sketchy. Would it try to compete with the NFL for players or be a minor league? Would the games be nationally televised? What kind of innovative rules would be utilized?

I contacted the league at the time to get answers to these questions, but none came. Instead, there was a videotaped “Founders Roundtable” that revealed, well, very little that hadn’t already been stated in the initial press release.

Later, the FFL website posted thumbnail sketches on each of the clubs. The Kings’ home city was described as a place “where Martin Luther King preached, and where Rosa Parks sat. Birmingham epitomizes the style and substance of the league.”*

* I hated to be “that guy,” but I emailed the FFL to let them know Parks’ iconic refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white man happened in Montgomery, not Birmingham, and to their credit they reworded the reference.

Anyway, as 2018 stretched into 2019, there were random name changes of the teams. The Kings became the Alabama Airmen, the Progress rebranded as the Portland Power, the Austin Revolution morphed into the Texas Revolution and St. Louis no longer has a nick – that would be for the fans to decide.

Thing is, none of these markets had actually made any kind of deal to host a team.

I continued to request info and made a point to frequently check the website, but it became obvious by the turn of the decade the FFL was dead in the water. The last update came in 2021 and if you to go to it now, all you get is a weird domain full of gibberish.

Thus, I think we can safely say that the Freedom Football League has officially joined a long line of alternative gridiron organizations that never made it past the concept stage.

And that’s a shame, because if nothing else it would’ve been cool to see the Ohio Players perform Fire and Love Rollercoaster at halftime of an Ohio Players game.

For someone who lives in the deep south of the United States, I spend an inordinate amount of time in deep thought about the Canadian Football League.

I’ve loved the CFL since I was first exposed to it more than 50 years ago, and over time the game played on a field that’s 150 yards long and 65 yards wide has become my favorite style of tackle football. When the Toronto Argonauts meet the Winnipeg Blue Bombers tonight at BC Place in the 111^th Grey Cup, I’ll be watching with great interest. Truth be told, I probably look forward to the Grey Cup more than the Super Bowl.

And even though the Hamilton Tiger-Cats are my favorite team in the circuit, I’m gonna find something to like about every club; I support the CFL as a whole, so I want all of its members to thrive.

And what I’d really like to see sooner than later is the CFL make the jump from nine franchises to 10.

Expansion to another Canadian market was something outgoing CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie hoped to accomplish during his seven-year tenure, but the stars (i.e. ownership groups) never aligned.

“I think the one thing I’ve learned is it’s hard, maybe impossible, to push your way into a market, a market has to pull you in,” Ambrosie said on Tuesday during his final “State of the League” news conference. “We’ve put down some breadcrumbs in markets like Halifax and Moncton and we had fantastic success this past season in Victoria (the “Touchdown Pacific” game). I wish it (expansion) would’ve happened these past few years but I think eventually it will and I think some of these breadcrumbs that I referred to might ultimately help to make that possible.”

A 10-team CFL would make things so much cleaner.

The East and West divisions would have five teams each (or maybe divisions would be scrapped entirely).

Better yet, its traditional 18-game regular season schedule would mean each club could play the others twice, which is perfect for people like me who have just a touch of OCD and crave a balanced slate.

Beyond that, it’d give fans a new team to cheer (or jeer).

The “Atlantic Schooners” were a conditional Nova Scotia-based franchise back in the 1980s, but basically never made it past the logo stage. The Schooners brand was revived in 2017 but – again – nothing came of it.

The area is still coveted by the CFL, but other cities have entered the chat as well.

“I’m very bullish on Quebec City, I’m bullish on Atlantic Canada,” Ambrosie said. “I also think that, as the country grows, markets like Windsor, for example, could potentially be open to our saleable branches. We’ve had conversations in that market about the possibility of hosting a game there.”

As a CFL fan in America I was thrilled with the U.S. expansion experiment in the 1990s, but I wouldn’t advocate for such a move now. It provided a much-needed influx of cash, but was ultimately a plan better in concept than reality.

You never say never, of course, but Ambrosie isn’t sold on another south of the Canadian border move, either.

“Personally, I’m not convinced that U.S. expansion is the way to go,” Ambrosie said. “I think we have something very special here with our Canadian content.”

For those unfamiliar with how CFL rosters are put together, teams have a “Game Rule Ratio.” On a 45-man roster, 21 players must be designated as Nationals (Canadians). That number can include one nationalized American. Such a rule would make little sense with a U.S.-based franchise.

“The Canadian ratio is going to be part of our league for many, many years to come and if you open yourself up to U.S. expansion, you’re going to have to make that change,” Ambrosie said. “You’re going to have to operate under different rules and I don’t think a great league operates under different rules — one set of rules that applies to everybody.

“Somewhere in all this great country of ours, there’s going to be a market that wants the CFL and is prepared to make the investment in a facility. I think our next best step to get to 10 is to do it in Canada.”

This is one Yank who agrees wholeheartedly. I have no idea what region of the country is the best fit and makes the most sense, but maybe we’ll get a chance to find out some day.

Regardless, I’ll still be cheering for the Canadian Football League –  even though the closest franchise to me is more than 900 miles away.