After 37 years, the USFL is being resurrected

In 1983, my senior year of high school back in Colorado, a brand new football league took to the field.

It was hugely exciting for me to watch the United States Football League because I could follow it from the start. I was immediately a big-time Denver Gold fan. I still am, but the Gold – nor any of the other USFL teams – have played a single down since the 1985 season came to an end.

All of that will end in April when a reincarnation of the USFL begins play with eight teams. Regrettably the Denver Gold is not one of the teams, but the Houston Gamblers are!

The revamped league is owned by FOX Sports and will be played in the spring, just like the original league. The current teams include the Gamblers, New Jersey Generals, Tampa Bay Bandits, New Orleans Breakers, Michigan Panthers, Philadelphia Stars, Pittsburgh Maulers, and the Birmingham Stallions.

Before you start searching for tickets, the first season will be played entirely in one city, to be named later. Naturally, with a TV network owning the league, they will direct fans to their television sets. FOX Sports will carry 22 of the 43 games, with 12 broadcast on FOX and 10 on FS1. NBC Sports will be the home of the other 21 games, with eight on NBC, nine on USA Network and four on Peacock.

From all appearances, the new USFL learned some painful and expensive lessons from the first version. It’s not gunning to be a spring league version of the NFL. It is taking a page out of the reincarnated XFL’s playbook, which played half a season before getting the kibosh by COVID in 2020. It is starting out slow with sub-NFL talent and carefully building fan bases in solid football markets.

That’s the way the first USFL was supposed to operate, but its owners went berserk and started dumping millions of dollars on top prospects and trashed the developmental playbook in favor of ruthless audibles called by a particularly mouthy, dishonest, egotistical moron who owned the New Jersey Generals. He was a real estate tycoon who went on to become the 45th president of the United States.

Donald Trump started signing Heisman Trophy winners and paying huge salaries, forcing the other owners to do likewise. He then led the charge to move the USFL to the fall, the domain of the NFL. That led Trump to sue the NFL in a famous case he actually won, but was awarded only $1 in damages by the jury. That essentially ended the league after three wild seasons.

If the insanely crazy history of the USFL interests you, I highly recommend the book “Football for a Buck” by Jeff Pearlman. Trust me, you won’t believe a lot of the stuff that happened in that league. Pearlman wrote a very well researched and documented gem that reads like a horror/comedy with an emphasis on the comedy.

Oh, and I contributed a photo of the Denver Gold that is errantly credited to the author. I am, however, acknowledged as a contributor in the epilogue. You see, the first professional football game I photographed from the sidelines was a Gold game against the Generals in 1985. The USFL and the Gold also afforded me the opportunity to see professional football games in person. The Denver Broncos were expensive and sold out, so a country bumpkin like me didn’t have much chance to see those games. Gold tickets were cheap and seating was plentiful.

Earlier I mentioned the XFL. I photographed all three of the Houston Roughnecks’ home games in 2020 and thoroughly enjoyed that league. COVID killed it, but Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson saved it and will bring it back for a third time in 2023 (the league played one season in 2001). How two leagues will function at the same time remains to be seen. All I know is I love both leagues and spring football. When I lived in North Carolina in 1991 I got to photograph a game between the Raleigh-Durham Skyhawks and the New York/New Jersey Knights of the World League of American Football. That spring league merged with the NFL as a minor league and later became the NFL Europe League, which folded in 2007.

Spring has proven to be a tough battlefield for professional football, but the interest is clearly there and I think the XFL would be hugely popular today had COVID not struck. Now the USFL is back and I’m hyped. I may not be in high school anymore, but having the USFL back makes me feel young again. If spring football interests you, please let me know.

(Joe Southern is the managing editor of the Wharton Journal-Spectator and East Bernard Express and can be reached at news@journal-spectator.com.)