A proposal to revive the USFL feels more like opening a time capsule than hitting on a promising idea. Pro football in the Spring? That was then, and it didn’t work so well.
The contemporary culture of the 1980s—the proliferation of cable television, a subsequent need for more programming, a bet on football’s endless attraction to gamblers, the urge to test sports’ saturation point—might have made the USFL idea worth a try in that distant past. Now? It’s possible to argue that as we emerge, blinking, from the coronavirus pestilence, we are finding there is too much sports to watch these days, and that there is a natural cycle of when people do not tune into certain athletic endeavors, a point reinforced by the pandemic’s skewing of scheduling routines.
With hockey and basketball playoffs last year delayed into August, baseball’s season opening put off until July and the Masters golf tournament moved to November, TV ratings were down across sports. That, in spite of the fact that TV most often was the only way to watch sports, since spectators were socially distanced right out of stadiums and arenas.
But here we are, looking at a blueprint that is four decades old.
Older, really. As far back as the 1970s Dave Dixon, an influential New Orleans businessman who helped create the Saints, the Louisiana Superdome and an early men’s pro tennis tour, tried to convince NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle that a supplemental Spring operation was a winning proposition.
Rozelle wasn’t buying. But by the ‘80s, Dixon made himself a key actor in bringing forth the USFL, convinced that the added variable of cable TV “changes the industry.” He partnered with ESPN, then a couple of years old, and cited consultants who hammered on the fact that, while the October/November/December quarter (traditional football season) indeed produced the best ratings, next in line was the April/May/June window.
The television promise was perceived to be so strong that Upton Bell, another of the original USFL founders, went so far as dismissing the need to sell tickets. He’d give them away, he said, and “guarantee a studio game.”
And now Brian Woods, working on the USFL’s reincarnation next Spring, appears to have bought into those 40-year-old presumptions. He is hyping a deal with Fox Sports for “giving fans everywhere the best football viewing product possible during what is typically a period devoid of professional football.”
OK. Here’s what happened in the Spring of 1983:
For its debut, the USFL placed 11 of its 12 franchises in NFL facilities and stirred significant attention, especially by signing a handful of Big Name college players. The most prominent of those was University of Georgia running back Herschel Walker, who had just won the Heisman Trophy in his junior season.
Several of us sports news hounds were in Orlando, Fla., when Walker was delivered to the training camp of the New Jersey Generals via private jet, helicopter and limo—all provided by team owner J. Walter Duncan, an Oklahoma oil tycoon—a week before the league’s first games.
That royal treatment was rewarded, to some extent, by Walker winning the league’s first rushing title. But the Generals, playing in the USFL’s primary market, won only six of 18 games and the leaguewide attendance average steadily declined to fewer than 25,000—a studio game!—by season’s end. The build-up to the first championship game that July in Denver—derided by some as the “Super-fluous Bowl,” “The Bowl to End All Bowls” and “Bowling for Dollars”—was overshadowed by the arrival at his NFL training camp, a few miles from Denver, by the NFL Broncos’ star rookie quarterback John Elway.
USFL officials, meanwhile, called the White House in an attempt to get President Ronald Reagan to telephone the winning lockerroom after the championship game—the Michigan Panthers defeated the Philadelphia Stars. But that fell on deaf ears of the man who fashioned himself “The Gipper” after the Notre Dame gridiron legend.
And things began to really unravel when Duncan, who had been talked into owning the Generals by Dixon, quickly sold the team to an attention-hog real estate developer named Donald Trump. Two seasons later, during which the USFL lost more than $120 million, Trump sealed the league’s demise by insisting it move its season to the Fall and go head-to-head with the NFL.
By then, the NFL had run the USFL out of stadiums in Boston, Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and Pete Rozelle made it clear that the NFL “never had discussions with the USFL about merging or taking in any of their teams.” (Which is what Trump had been angling for.)
“You really think,” an NFL official said, “that NFL would stand still for Donald Trump?”
Some things don’t seem worth a do-over.