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Good news for the upstart United Football League. After 16-years the NFL’s player development ‘World League’, now NFL Europa, has folded. Not that the UFL should become a development league for the NFL, but it’s clear that the pool of available talent for a new league has just expanded greatly.

I think this would be a good time for officials at the UFL to announce the next stage of their progress as signal to former NFL Europa players not to give up hope.

Mike at The Ranch Report draws on his 14 year relationship with Mark Cuban and advises his readers not to bet against Mark if he thinks the UFL can succeed. Among the 10 reasons the league might work are:

10) Each owner will put up $30 million to own half the team. No group ownerships. No divergent levels of commitment. One man. One team. Commitment.9) The other halves of the franchises will eventually be sold to fans. Your shares will make YOU an owner of a pro football team. Tell me you haven’t always wanted that!

Alas, I think he got this wrong. The league will own a third, the owner group a third, and the fans a third (after a few years of running the league). Growing sour yet Mike?
 

6) There is talent available. I’m around Texas high school football a lot. I was at an NFL-eligible free-agent camp the other day. There are a limitless number of athletes worthy of a look. (Which makes for a limitless number of stories to be told by the media.) And that’s not even counting the guys who get a cup o’ coffee in the NFL, or maybe even established NFL people who get the boot. Remember when the “scabs’’ filled in? Was the level of football, altered or not, impactful in your watching habits? No. I haven’t asked Cuban about the UFL’s interest level in the Pacman Joneses of the football world, but. … that’d be good TV, huh?

I too am curious about the UFL’s interest in the players with a ‘rebel image’. You would think attracting top caliber coaches to the league will be important. I don’t know how many of them are interested in dealing with the Tank Johnson and Pacman Joneses of the world. Especially when you’re trying to get a league off the ground.

Mike makes a lot of good points and I know I’m a believer in the league. How about you?

Stephen Dubner recently sent some user-generated questions to Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban for the Freakonomics blog. Part two will have the UFL related questions, but part one is up for your reading pleasure right now.

As I wrote about here, there is another upstart professional football league in the works. ESPN’s Page 2 columnist Chuck Klosterman takes a look at the All American Football League (AAFL) and rates its chances.

the AAFL has no intention of competing with anyone, and that might be its saving grace. Instead, it’s trying to appeal to the kind of (typically Southern) dude who dreams of a universe where college football never ends.
…
if the AAFL truly does what it intends — if it creates a professional, lo-fi version of major college football — it will immediately be more watchable than any pro sport that’s currently in existence.

Look for the AAFL to debut in the spring of 2008. No really. They’re holding auditions in Orlando this July.

If the AAFL is successful what does that mean for the UFL? It could mean a smaller talent pool for UFL’s teams, but since the leagues run at opposite times of the year, it might also function as a training camp for UFL prospects. CFL and semi-pro players typically play in more than one league during a year. So that’s not unheard of. It also means that the UFL would be less likely to play spring games (although that is looking very unlikely already) and that some of the cities the UFL is exploring might refuse to host a team being happy with the AAFL version (although I don’t see any city turning away tax revenue generated from tickets).

King Kaufman at Salon.com talks with investment banker Bill Hambrecht who is half of the pair putting up $4 to get the United Football League up and running. Hambrecht, as it turns out, is also an investor in Salon - so read with a careful eye, I guess. In the interview Hambrecht reveals why the league will succeed (the fans), whether they will recruite high school players (probably not, but no decision so far), and a lot more.

One of the interesting truisms is that ‘Stars Are Made By The Team’. He Hate Me (Rod Smart) was a nobody before the XFL, he was an undrafted free agent at San Diego. The UFL expects to have even more breakout stars by focusing on players like Rod Smart and then making them stars.

Hambrecht also says some controversial stuff about the Friday Night Game plan:

Take a look at the numbers. They’re very minor. They’re tiny. It really is in only three or four areas of the country. Basically, the people who go to high school football games are the parents. The whole “Friday Night Lights” stuff, when you really look at the numbers, it doesn’t happen in urban America. It happens in rural America, but it doesn’t happen in urban America.

Solution; set your teams only in urban areas. But you’re still loosing out on the tv ratings for those families with high school athletes. Plus who do you think builds your fan base. It’s the high school football players who dream of being Tom Brady or Jerry Rice. If the student isn’t home to see that talent development on the UFL team, then how will those players become idols and stars? I think this could be one of the key problems with Friday night games.

This interview reveals more of the details that make me think the UFL will be a successful league. It’s not going to happen over night, but it’s going to happen.

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Two For Elbowing thinks the UFL’s real competition, at least until they’re established, is the AFL and the CFL.

There’s demand for top-quality football — heck, the arena football league shows there’s demand for a 2nd tier of entertaining football. But there’s the rub: the AFL already exists and has gotten itself pretty well entrenched. the UFL not only has to compete with the NFL, but with the AFL (and to a lesser degree, the CFL in Canada): compete for mindshare, compete for fans, compete for talent, and compete for that most rarified resource — television contract time and money.

The other question posed by Two for Elbowing was “how saturated is sports television?” Take ESPN, FSN and all their variants, then add in all the minor cable channels (Speed, Versus, Golf Channel, etc), add in the pay-tv channels, and the Broadcast and Cable network contracts and you’ve got a lot of sports out there at any time. But I think there are still mighty holes in this net. The UFL is obviously tossing around the idea of Friday night (although that might have been just a trial balloon to judge audience reaction), which is one of the openings. Spring football is another.

Now add in the Internet, which Mark Cuban and Tim Armstrong have strong experience in, and I think you will see the UFL debut with a new model for content distribution. Sure, the games will be broadcast on some cable network (USA, TNT, perhaps the CW), but the internet will all be geared to growing a fan base instead of generating revenue. Look for replays on Joost (or the equivalent), coach and player pre and post game interviews on YouTube, special inside the training room access, team blogs, fan created content, and plenty of other avenues that will open in the next 12 months (half a lifetime in internet years). That’s all speculation, of course, but don’t count the UFL out just because their games don’t end up on NBC or CBS.

Sports Business Simulations claims to have accurate predicting models for major league sports. They haven’t thrown one together yet for the UFL, but they claim that the lessons learned from running their XFL simulation give the UFL only a dim chance at success.

What I learned from the XFL Simworld is that the XFL, and now the UFL, stand a better chance of survival if they hire recently retired or close to retiring NFL players and mix them with college players. Why? Because each of the NFL players close to ending their careers either by choice or for other reasons has their own brand name. For example, you know who Keyshawn Johnson is if you’re even a causal fan of the game. But do you know who Jacoby Jones is?

While it’s not exactly an apples to oranges comparison, it doesn’t sound like the UFL and XFL will be all that similar in their execution. But we’ll have to wait and see since no details of any sort have come out other than ownership details, the three initial cities (Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Mexico City), and Mark Cuban’s ownership and interest in the Las Vegas team. That’s about all we know of the actual game plan. Patience everyone. (Read)