No use competing with the NFL

By John McMullen  |   Sunday, March 15, 2009  |  Comments( 4 )

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Winston Churchill was quite the orator.

A former British Prime Minister, Churchill was chiefly known for his stewardship of the United Kingdom during World War II.

His most famous quote? "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

The people running the fledgling United Football League evidently aren't historians. If they were, they would know the NFL's history is littered with the corpses of neophyte leagues that were hoping to capitalize off America's supposed love of football.

I'll let you in on a little secret, though. America doesn't love football; rather, it loves the NFL.

Competition for the league dates back to the 1940s, long before the NFL passed Major League Baseball as our favorite pastime.

The All-America Football Conference (AAFC) was the NFL's most formidable challenger, lasting from 1946 to 1949. The AAFC attracted many of the nation's best college players, produced one of pro football's greatest teams (the Cleveland Browns, who won every championship in the league's four years of operation), and introduced a number of lasting innovations to the game.

The AAFC was ultimately unable to sustain itself, but three of its teams were admitted to the NFL; two survive today.

The league's biggest rival turned out to be the American Football League in the 1960s. The AFL operated from 1960 until 1969 and was strong enough to actually merge with the more established NFL. Initially viewed as inferior, the AFL began attracting top talent from colleges and the NFL by the mid-'60s, well before the common draft which began in 1967.

In 1966, a merger between the two leagues was announced, but it was not finalized until 1970. During its final two years of its existence, the AFL won Super Bowls III (Jets over Colts) and IV (Chiefs over Vikings), the former considered among one of the biggest upsets in sports history.

The NFL continued to establish itself from there before facing its next attempt at competition in the '70s with the World Football League. The WFL's ambition was to bring American football to the rest of the world; hence the name. The farthest the league, which played in 1974 and part of '75, reached was Honolulu, Hawaii.

The WFL was founded by Gary Davidson, who also helped start the marginally successful American Basketball Association and World Hockey Association but didn't have the same success with football.

The league did succeed in helping talent, however. Average salaries of NFL players were the lowest in the four major sports at the time when the Toronto Northmen signed three well-known Miami Dolphins players in fullback Larry Csonka, halfback Jim Kiick and wide receiver Paul Warfield to what was then the richest three-player deal in sports.

The Oakland Raiders also lost both of their quarterbacks to the WFL. Ken Stabler signed with the Birmingham Americans and Daryle Lamonica inked a deal to start playing for the Southern California Sun in 1975.

By early June of 1974, the WFL had 60 NFL regulars under contract, but reports of financial hardship quickly came to the forefront. There were stories of Portland Storm players having to be fed by their fans and the Charlotte Hornets having their uniforms impounded for not paying a laundry bill. Meanwhile, Florida Blazers players reportedly survived on McDonald's meal vouchers.

By 1975, the league was dead.

Less than a decade later came the next big-spending pretender to the throne, the United States Football League. The USFL played three seasons between 1983 and 1985 and reportedly lost over $163 million, an astounding figure for that era. It was, however, by far the NFL's strongest competitor since the AFL.

The USFL was the brainchild of David Dixon, a New Orleans antique dealer, who had been instrumental in bringing the Saints to the Big Easy. In 1980, Dixon commissioned a study by Frank Magid Associates that said people were ready for a spring and summer football league.

The USFL was born by '83 and quickly reached an over-the-air television agreement with ABC Sports and a cable deal with ESPN.

The league eventually folded in 1988 after an anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL failed.

Perhaps the NFL's most comical competitor came in 2001 when Vince McMahon, impresario of World Wrestling Entertainment (then the World Wrestling Federation), created the XFL. A joint venture between the NBC television network and the WWF, the XFL was created as a "single-entity league," meaning that the teams were not individually owned and operated.

The XFL had impressive television coverage for an upstart league, with three games televised each week on NBC, UPN and TNN, but it lost over $70 million during its lone season.

And that brings us to the present.

The UFL made quite the splash last week, announcing a television deal with VERSUS followed by the coronation of three solid former NFL coaches as pilots of the league's teams during its inaugural season.

At a press conference at AT&T Park in San Francisco last Wednesday, league commissioner Michael Huyghue announced that Jim Fassel and Jim Haslett, a pair of former NFL Coaches of the Year, will join Dennis Green and Ted Cottrell as team mentors.

For a league pushing "affordable, innovative and exciting new football," the announcement was a bit of a coup. After all, it's hard to argue that the NFL has 32 better head coaches than Green, Fassel and Haslett. They probably have 232 better than Cottrell, but I digress.

It's conceivable that a game featuring Green's San Francisco team against Haslett's Orlando club or Fassel's New York/New Jersey entrant could be a better coached affair than a handful of NFL games on the same given weekend.

And it's more than conceivable that America won't care.

"Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
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About John McMullen

John is the managing editor of The Phanatic Magazine, the assistant managing editor of The Sports Network and the co-host of the highly rated 'Johns on Sports' radio show on WTBQ in New York. Every Saturday from 6:30-9 p.m. (et) you can hear John along with his co-host, John Gottlieb, talk to the ...
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