Just days before the UFL’s second season kicks off, the league is experiencing a crisis from within, which is calling into question its long-term viability.
Hopefully, by the time this blog-like rant hits the press, it will have aged poorly when the storms subside. Nevertheless, even if things eventually get settled, the dark cloud over the league has dampened anticipation and excitement. Ultimately, it may halt business and the league’s momentum.
Detractors and doubters of the concept of spring pro football in the United States are having a winning time with the recent cavalcade of negative news about the UFL.
Skeptics of Spring Pro Football’s viability have come to expect these headlines: players threatening a walkout due to pay grievances and head coaches abandoning ship just days before kickoff.
Negative stories being attached to non-NFL pro leagues are expected. The truth is that the UFL has to fight extremely hard to gain any traction in mainstream sports media. Positive stories are few and far between. Typically, outfits like the UFL get headlines when something goes awry, whether that be the standard business struggles that any young business encounters, particularly a fledgling pro football league. Or any other entity that tries to defy a doomed history.
A history that has witnessed multiple non-NFL pro football leagues in the United States dying miserable deaths for the last several decades. One after another, each league decayed quickly for a multitude of reasons. However, the one commonality in their rapid deaths has always been finances.
Along comes FOX Sports, ESPN, RedBird Capital Partners, Dany Garcia, and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, who have combined forces to give Spring Pro Football its last legitimate shot at beating the odds. I chronicled this in January 2024 over at Sports Illustrated, but it bears repeating.
UFL Provides Last Hope For Long-Term Viability
Let’s face it, if the UFL dies tomorrow, there will be other groups, that try to crawl into the space, in fact, some are hanging around the periphery now, hoping for some sun to shine their way, but any new league that does make the feeble attempt, won’t have the benefit of an exposure package the UFL has, with the majority of its games on broadcast network television on FOX, and ABC, and the rest airing on ESPN. Even with an evolving streaming world, as a young sports league in its infancy, you couldn’t ask for better high-end product accessibility and presentation.
The UFL is not without its flaws, but it’s a shame that impending stories of doom are hovering over the league heading into its second season, especially after a year that saw them produce its highest-quality product on the field, thanks to the merger’s condensing of 16 teams into 8.
Once again, spring pro football produced players and coaches who have gone on to success and stable jobs in the NFL. Without the UFL, People like Detroit Lions star kicker Jake Bates wouldn’t have had the opportunity to follow the same path that NFL All-Pros Brandon Aubrey and KaVontae Turpin have taken after playing in the Spring.
Furthermore, the UFL’s TV ratings in 2024 greatly surpassed the USFL and XFL’s viewership in 2022 and 2023. These are all positive trends for a league trying to defy the odds, a trait that is the lifeblood of anyone associated with it.
On top of it all, much like the XFL in 2001, XFL 2020, and the relaunched USFL in 2022, the UFL is continuing to get ahead of the football landscape with fan-friendly on-field and broadcast innovations that are slowly being adopted by the NFL and passed off as their own.
The trend of being ahead of the game will hopefully continue in UFL 2025 with the league’s new camera and accessibility innovations. ESPN College Football Lead producer Bill Bonnell, who has won a dozen Sports Emmys and helped implement the original XFL Skycam, which changed football viewing forever, is on board with the UFL this season to continue innovating in a space that exists because of FOX, RedBird, and the company’s investment in making non-NFL pro football finally last.
One of the primary reasons FOX and the UFL’s leadership group have reached this point is that they have avoided the same mistakes so many others have made in trying to make Spring Pro Football a thing by being financially responsible every step of the way —crawling so that the league can walk and then run without limits.
The irony is that in doing so, some of the league’s players and coaches, who benefit greatly from the UFL’s existence, are not content with the measured pace and are looking to skip ahead quicker or get out of the equation entirely. The question is, to what end will these measures accomplish? The answer might mean the league meeting its end.
The doomsday clock has been on standby for a league like the UFL, but moving it closer to midnight before the second season commences was unnecessary.
