In 2019, the Alliance of American Football folded during its inaugural season. In 2020, the XFL made a comeback -- and also folded during its first season. Those back-to-back failures made spring football look like a losing proposition.
So the USFL, which launches on Saturday night, has one primary goal: Do well enough in its first year to come back for a second year.
“The rally cry here is getting to Year 2,” USFL Executive Vice President Daryl Johnston told Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal.
Saturday night’s first game should draw a solid audience if for no other reason than it will be broadcast live on both NBC and Fox. It’s highly unusual for two broadcast networks to show the same game -- it hasn’t happened since 2007, when the Patriots concluded their historic 16-0 regular season with a win over the Giants -- and the mere fact that two of the four broadcast networks are showing the same game ought to be enough for the USFL to do good numbers in its premiere.
Beyond that, however, there are challenges. Foremost among them is that the quality of play in spring leagues typically hasn’t been very good. Fans turned on the XFL and AAF at first, but quickly determined that the football on display was simply not entertaining enough to be worth investing three hours in. No one has any illusions that the players in the USFL are as good as NFL players, but the league at least needs to make the games fun to watch. That’s where the XFL and AAF struggled.
At the same time, the USFL is a very low-cost league, and Fox owns it. That means Fox may be willing to keep it around merely to have inexpensive programming, even if it’s not programming that consistently draws large audiences.
So the USFL doesn’t have all that high a bar to clear in order to find success: Just do well enough that Fox doesn’t cancel it after one season. That would make it a greater success than the AAF and XFL.
