The league reportedly will be moving four teams.
On July 29th, 1986, a jury found that the National Football League did harm the United States Football’s chances of succeeding but only awarded the USFL a dollar in damages. Because the law called for triple the financial damage award, the USFL ended up with three dollars. That pretty much ended the USFL and spring football in the United States until 2001 when wrestling promoter Vince McMahon’s XFL appeared. That league lated a year. The 2019 Alliance of American Football didn’t last a full season and McMahon’s 2020 XFL was derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The XFL was scooped up in a bankruptcy proceeding by a group led by the wrestler-actor Dwayne Johnson and resumed play in 2023. A second USFL formed and began play in 2022. The XFL and USFL merged after the 2023 season to form the United Football League.
The new entity is not doing any better than other spring leagues and there was a report that the UFL owners are ready to move four teams to other locales. Birmingham, Detroit, Houston and Memphis are reportedly being dumped with Boise, Idaho, Columbus, Ohio, either Lexington or Louisville, Kentucky and either Orlando or Tampa, Florida replacing those markets. The UFL is looking for places that could support a team but Boise and the Kentucky markets do give the league an air of minor league status. Why is spring football such a tough sell? Sports competition during those months. Americans love football in the fall and winter, but spring football has never been successful financially. The UFL has a lot of competition from Major League Baseball spring training and the opening of the season, college basketball’s conference championships and the Men’s Final Four, the Masters golf tournament, the Kentucky Derby, the NBA and NHL playoffs, NFL free agency, the NFL Draft and even WrestleMania.
NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle after being interviewed by this reporter in 1896 during the USFL-NFL antitrust lawsuit
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