Who could ever forget the XFL?
Tim Armstrong, Bill Hambrecht and Mark Cuban, to name three.
The three men are involved in creating a second professional football league with plans to begin playing games by fall 2008.
Word of the UFL's plans broke last week. It’s being formed by Google senior executive vice president Armstrong and WR Hambrecht + Company founder Hambrecht.
Though they haven’t released many details about the league, such as how many games it will play per season, they’ve recruited Dallas Mavericks owner Cuban, one of the most aggressive and popular owners in all of sports, to own their first of eight planned franchises.
Armstrong and Hambrecht have hired two people with mainstream pro sports experience, former NBA executives Bill Daugherty and Jon Brod, as chief executive and chief operating officer, instead of relying on entertainment types with little sports background to run things.
As TV ratings show, Americans have an insatiable appetite for football, and the new league, called the United Football League, would play games alongside the National Football League in the fall.
This would set it apart from the other pro football leagues like Arena Football and of course the ill-fated XFL, which have played in the spring.
The UFL plans to court top players and pay them top dollar, unlike other pro football leagues, which subsist on NFL Europe leftovers and guys who never made the NFL.
By pursuing deep-pocketed owners like Cuban, the billionaire behind HDNet and Broadcast.com, who will front $30 million for his franchise, the UFL sets itself up as a competitor to the NFL, not just a complement.
It will need serious investors to do so.
“Is it crazy to try to compete with the NFL? I don’t think so,” writes Cuban on his blog, Blogmaverick.com. “There is obviously demand for top-level professional football, [and] the NFL wants and needs competition.”
The UFL is targeting cities without NFL teams initially, such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas, as well as Mexico City. The NFL has scheduled games in Mexico before to great success, and branching out in this way would create a new and potentially loyal audience for football in general.
Of course many people are still skeptical of any NFL competitor after the XFL debacle six years ago. When NBC and the Worldwide Wrestling Federation teamed to launch the league in 2001, there were big expectations.
But after huge ratings for its first weekend, the XFL bombed. It was doomed by over-the-top stunting, such as crude trash talking by the players and dizzying camera angles, and placement on a night, Saturday, where TV viewership had been declining for years.
Worst of all, the football on display was just plain awful.
Columnists immediately cautioned that the UFL should learn from the XFL's mistakes by scheduling games on Tuesday through Friday, to avoid competing directly for eyeballs with the NFL, which airs Sunday and Monday, and college football, which dominates Saturday.
And the UFL needs to draw marquee names to give it some immediate legitimacy and ensure that the quality of football will be high. Otherwise, there’s no reason for viewers to tune in.
“Each team has to have half a dozen big-name players to make it work,” Drew Rosenhaus, the agent for players such as Dallas Cowboys star Terrell Owens, tells SportsBusiness Journal.
The UFL’s success may ultimately rest on one key dynamic, however.
“There are a lot of smart people involved in the UFL,” points out Cuban on his blog.
He himself has gotten in on the ground of two nascent trends that took off, broadband and high-definition television, while Armstrong was a pioneer with Google.
