The new USFL is already showing a lack of commitment
Stephen H. Provost
So, the USFL is back. Kind of.
This isn’t your grandfather’s USFL. That much was made clear when plans surfaced to play all the league’s games in 2022 in a single locale: Birmingham, Alabama.
Fox Sports is putting a bunch of money into this, which makes it seem like a solid endeavor. But is it?
Something about playing all the league’s games in a single venue feels half-baked. It’s like going to the set of your favorite Western and discovering that all the “buildings” are all just false fronts. There won’t be any “New Jersey Generals” or “Jacksonville Bulls” when the league kicks off (if it does kick off, and if those teams are among those playing). There will be the Birmingham Generals and the Birmingham Bulls and the Birmingham everything elses.
If you’re a fan of one of those teams with the empty city name, you’ll have to travel hundreds of miles or more to see them.
That’s phony. It’s bogus. It’s more like an NFL combine with scrimmages and scores than anything else.
This isn’t the first time a “travel team” has operated in a league framework. Back in 1926, a team called the Los Angeles Buccaneers played in the NFL. But the team never played a single game in Los Angeles. Still, it did play in other league cities such as Canton, Buffalo, Providence, and Chicago. Those teams, however, all DID play real home games.
This isn’t like the NBA bubble, which was necessitated by the COVID pandemic. If COVID had anything to do with this, they wouldn’t be playing in Alabama, which has been a hotspot for COVID along with the rest of the South.
A matter of commitment
I’m old enough to remember the old roller derby leagues, which staged matches in Los Angeles and San Francisco against teams that supposedly represented nebulous places like the Midwest or Texas. They never competed there — if “competed” is even the right world, since roller derby games were on the order of scripted WWE wrestling matches.
None of this is to say that USFL games will be anything but legitimately contested. If the league actually gets off the ground, I’m sure they will be playing real games. But the cities won’t be real. They’ll be just names on a TV screen. The Orlando Renegades might as well be called the Kazakhstan Renegades or the Uranus Renegades or Riley’s Renegades (the actual name of an old roller derby team).
All of that makes it seem a little fly-by-night. The league is showing no commitment to the communities it claims to represent. It could call it a day after the first season in Birmingham, and not a single fan in any of those communities would ever have attended a home game. That’s not fair to the fans.
Contrast that with the Alliance of American Football and the XFL (and the original USFL), which played games in the cities that were part of those leagues. That showed commitment to the fans and to, well, to reality. If the USFL wants to play all its games in Birmingham, it shouldn’t use city names in conjunction with team nicknames. It’s dishonest.
Stephen H. Provost spent more than 30 years as a journalist covering sports and other issues at daily newspapers. He is the author of a book on failed sports leagues, the official biography of Molly Bolin, and other works , all of which are available on Amazon.