Another year, another spring football league. Although the two most recent efforts had very different reasons for their rapid demises (the AAF spent much more money than it made, and XFL 2.0 was taken down by the pandemic), the past four decades are littered with periodic spring-football failures.
Enter the USFL. Not the original USFL, but a new iteration that (for now) is using the names of eight teams that played under the four-letter banner in the 1980s. Owned by Fox and televised by Fox and NBC, it seems to be a made-for-TV operation -- one that hopes to capitalize on the ongoing spread of legalized gambling.
It’s definitely not made for in-person attendance. Via WBRC.com, roughly 40,000 tickets were sold or distributed for Saturday night’s game. However, the actual attendance was in the neighborhood of 17,500.
That’s not the best way to launch a new league. All regular-season games will be played in Birmingham (a city of more than 200,000), and only 17,500 showed up or the inaugural game, featuring the one team that carries the Birmingham name.
It got worse on Sunday, when the vast majority of the seats were empty for a doubleheader. It becomes very difficult to get fans to watch a spectator sport that has no in-person spectators. Give away tickets. Give away food. Do whatever has to be done to make it feel like a big deal on TV. That’s what will get the TV audience to regard it as a big deal and either tune in or stay tuned in.
That’s why the NFL clung to the blackout rule for so long. It refused to televise a game locally if the game wasn’t sold out at least 48 hours before kickoff. The league wants human beings to serve as the background images for games. The more people present, the more important the game seems.
The inverse is definitely true. If no one is in the stands, it becomes much harder to get fans to care. Thus, as the powers-that-be gather to break down the first weekend of the new USFL, the No. 1 challenge should be obvious.
Come up with a way to get a lot more people to show up for the games.
