More than 30 years ago an upstart football league tried to take on the NFL. All it got was $3.76. Just ask Donald Trump about it.
Entrepreneurs will identify every possible way to monetize America’s appetite for football. They’ll buy up all the football, repackage it and sell it back to the consumers, err, fans. They control the sport’s fate.
But what would it take, if anything, for the market to collapse?
The made-for-TV National Football League experience certainly hasn’t reached its tipping point. The made-for-RV followers of college football are still plopping down bags of money without upsetting the apple cart.
History shows many shipwrecks, but the one with the sturdiest bow sank nearly 30 years ago, the United States Football League. The USFL lasted three seasons from 1983-85 before imploding, not so much from lack of fan interest, but from greedy executives and mismanagement.
The USFL was proof that there’s no patience for sustaining moderate success while you’re leaving potential money on the table.
“Greed and patience don’t live together very well,” said Keith Jackson, who broadcasted USFL games for ABC. “I think fundamentally the one word you could use to describe why the USFL went away would be greed. It’s that simple.”
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The USFL emerged shortly after the NFL’s strike-shortened season in 1982, at a time when cable TV and ESPN were also emerging as fast as America’s desire for more football. The idea was conceived by league founder David Dixon, an antiques dealer, of all things, but an astute businessman who helped New Orleans land an NFL franchise and build the Superdome.
Previous attempts at establishing pro football leagues opposite the NFL provided Dixon a map to forming the USFL. The American Football League of the 1960s was successful at thriving in markets not occupied by the NFL, before its teams eventually merged with the NFL as equals. The World Football League of the 1970s existed in NFL cities. The difference was te
levision contracts: the AFL had one, the WFL didn’t.
No surprise, the first commissioner of the USFL was a TV executive, Chet Simmons, the former president of ESPN and NBC Sports. Although the USFL already negotiated a two-year, $20 million deal with ABC before Simmons’ hiring, he was able to strike a deal with his former company ESPN, the network’s first such agreement with a sports league.
The television deals with ABC and ESPN distributed $1.1 million to each of the USFL’s 12 teams, which were located in cities that would bring the largest television audiences. In fact, teams existing in the New York, Chicago and Los Angeles markets were required in the ABC agreement.
The USFL was unique. Games were played in the spring and summer, from March to July, and a territorial draft was held, keeping some players within their region to increase fans’ affinity for their teams. Even nuances such as the two-point conversion and the red-flag replay challenges induced by coaches were first used by the USFL years before they became part of the NFL.
The USFL also aggressively pursued players, poaching would-be NFL players with more lucrative contracts. Three straight Heisman Trophy winners first played in the USFL before playing in the NFL, including the league’s biggest star, Herschel Walker. More than 200 players played in the NFL after the USFL folded, including future Hall of Famers Jim Kelly, Reggie White and Steve Young.
Television ratings were respectable for the first season in 1983, as the average rating on ABC was 6.1 and on ESPN 3.3. The average attendance also met Dixon’s threshold of 25,000 for the league to be a success, including the New Jersey Generals who averaged 41,000 fans.
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What went wrong?
For one, the league attempted to grow too quickly. The USFL grew from 12 teams in 1983 to an 18-team league in 1984 as league executives attempted to renegotiate the television deals. Diluted teams in smaller markets resulted in an average attendance drop of 10 percent for the second year.
But a group of owners, most notably New Jersey Generals owner Donald Trump, wanted to take on the NFL and they wouldn’t settle for their second-rate status.
The USFL pacified football fans by filling a void during the spring, and avoiding direct competition with the NFL, but Trump considered the spring a “wasteland.”
“I never liked to idea of spring football,” Trump said. “Everything I do is, sort of, at the highest level.”
Trump was portrayed as the villain in the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary about the USFL. Trump played the role, too, becoming petulant in his interview with producer Mike Tollin as he dismissed the league with a term Tollin used in the title of the documentary, “Small Potatoes: Who killed the USFL?”
Trump convinced other owners to take on the NFL, both in-season and in the courtroom. In 1984, when the USFL announced it would play in the spring of 1985 then move to a fall schedule for the 1986 season, a handful of teams either folded or relocated prior to the 1985 season. Then the USFL filed an anti-trust lawsuit that claimed the NFL monopolized the three TV networks.
The USFL won the lawsuit, as the court agreed that the NFL maintained a monopoly, but it couldn’t conclude that the NFL intended to force the USFL off television and determined that the USFL was harmed more by its own mismanagement. The USFL was awarded one dollar in damages, which tripled to three dollars under anti-trust law, and 76 cents of interest was earned during an appeal. Tollin showed Trump the uncashed check for $3.76 during his interview.
After the verdict was read in July 1986, the league suspended operations for its first fall season. A sect of owners, led by Tampa Bay Bandits owner John Bassett, resisted the move to a fall schedule and intended to continue a spring league, but Bassett’s failing health quelled the efforts.
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The death of an ephemeral league nearly 30 years ago is certainly not a harbinger for the NFL’s or college football’s demise. However, it is a reminder that football’s future is decided in the boardrooms that are crowded by scheming entrepreneurs like Donald Trump.
Yes, we’ve proven to have a large appetite for football. But ever market has a saturation point. And like the USFL, whoever invests the money that exceeds how much we can stomach sure will have a mess to clean up.