A Barren Source of Amusement

Tomorrow night is the debut of the UFL. The what? Yes, the United Football League, a 4-team league playing a six game season to be telecast on Versus and HDNet, this October and November.

If you don’t have HD, you don’t have HDNet. If you have DirecTV, you don’t have Versus, which DirecTV has dropped in a dispute with Comcast saying they don’t want to pay for “basically a paid programming and infomercial channel with occasional sporting events of interest”. (Harsh.) So there’s a very strong possibility that the TV ratings will be abysmal. In addition, the San Francisco-based “California Redwoods” are the only team playing all three home games in the same stadium – the “New York Sentinels” will play one home game in Connecticut, one in Giants Stadium in New Jersey, and one in the new Mets stadium in Queens, while the “Las Vegas” team plays one in Los Angeles and the “Florida” team plays two in Orlando and one in Tampa. So it’s going to be tricky to actually go out and see the teams in person. If there’s precious little TV and multiple stadiums happening, who exactly is going to be seeing this?

John Clayton has it right: this is a soft launch to get infrastructure in place with an eye toward 2010 and 2011. In 2010, unless the NFL comes to a new labor agreement, there will be an uncapped year which should set the personnel situation in the league on puree – and in 2011, if the NFL has not come to a labor agreement, there will almost certainly be a lockout, giving the UFL the chance to pick up premium talent.

This sort of shit comes along every four or five years – somebody thinks that they can start a second league and carve out a niche. The WFL in the mid-1970s (one and a half years), the USFL in the mid-80s (three years), the NFL’s own World League of American Football in the early 90s (two years in the US, then another ten or so exclusively in Europe), the CFL’s expansion into the United States in the mid-90s (two years), the XFL in 2001 (one famously mocked year) – and now, with the UFL starting up, there are no less than three other entities purporting to play spring football in 2010 (including one group ludicrously claiming to be reviving the USFL).

Professional football isn’t like hockey or baseball – there is no tradition of a professional developmental league. There has been overflow to the CFL for decades, and the Arena Football League caught some of that as well from the late 80s on – but the CFL had the advantage of a whole nation to itself, and the Arena League only had to fill the lower bowl of the typical urban multipurpose arena rather than turn out possibly tens of thousands of fans. And even so, the Arena League didn’t survive the onset of the current recession.

The big catch, though, is that there’s already a long established developmental league for professional football – it’s called the NCAA, and for over a hundred years it’s filled dozens of stadiums every Saturday in the fall with fans a thousand times more passionate than any American minor league has ever managed. The UFL’s not competing with the NFL – they’re competing with the NFL plus Cal, Stanford, San Jose State, Nevada, UNLV, Florida, Florida State, Miami, Central Florida, South Florida, Rutgers, Syracuse and Notre Dame*, just to name the obvious. Are there people with enough attention span for pro football, college football, AND the UFL? Probably, but how many?

Finally, the UFL is playing on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights. Thursday night has become one of ESPN’s feature games in college ball, and while minor games are also played on Friday, the consensus is that Friday belongs to high school ball – so much that the NFL is forbidden by law from playing or broadcasting games within 75 miles of a high school game on Friday from September to mid-December.

SO…are there people who have the time to pay attention AND will do so in preference to other games AND have the resources and willingness to either buy tickets or to seek out Versus and HDNet telecasts? And are there enough of them to make the UFL a going concern long enough to attempt to capitalize on a labor explosion that may never take place?

Ax me. –NO.

It was different for the AFL. They came along at a time when the NFL had only a dozen teams, with several markets large enough to sustain a second entrant (New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area), football-mad parts of the world with no NFL presence (Buffalo, Texas, Florida), and only one national television outlet (CBS – at a time when teams largely sold their own television rights individually). There weren’t five channels in existence, let alone five showing NFL action (CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, and the NFL Network). In short, the market for professional football was nowhere near the saturation point it is now, with 32 teams and two games a week in prime time.

This is one time where you look at the graveyard of the last 35 years and have to face the honest-to-God free-market truth: if there were a way to make money off a second professional football league, somebody would have done it by now.

* My understanding is that ABC Sports considers New York City to be a Notre Dame market for purposes of regional telecasts. May be true, maybe not, but the New York market was indisputably involved in the use of “Fighting Irish” as a nickname and the development of the tradition of “subway alumni”.