UFL DC Defenders wide receiver Seth Williams Credit: Jeff Le-Imagn Images

The UFL saw some pretty significant viewership declines in its second season, but the league’s executives aren’t worried.

Saturday’s UFL Championship Game between the DC Defenders and Michigan Panthers averaged 983,000 viewers on ABC, down 39% from last year’s title game on Fox (1.6 million viewers). Last year’s game aired in primetime on Father’s Day. Overall, the league averaged 645,000 viewers per game this season, down 21% from the 812,000 viewers per game the UFL averaged last season.

Despite the substantial falloff in viewership, the league’s top executives are still striking a positive tone. According to a report by Jacob Camenker in USA Today, “the league isn’t worried at all about the ratings decline, opining they were still ‘phenomenal’ compared to other programming.”

“People would give their eyeteeth for the amount of eyeballs that are watching our games on TV,” UFL president Russ Brandon told USA Today.

That may be true, at least to an extent. The UFL finished its second season still well above other debutante leagues like TGL, which averaged 513,000 viewers per match, and Unrivaled, which averaged 221,000 viewers per game. Both of those leagues, however, did not have the benefit of airing across two broadcast networks like the UFL. TGL and Unrivaled aired games exclusively on cable, often in less desirable windows than the UFL.

Still, it seems the spring football league is preparing for Year 3.

“Our first-year merge was murky for us to understand; what does the market actually think of us, and who are we?” UFL owner Dany Garcia said. “This is the year that we got the clarity, and now we know who we are, and now we push forward.”

At the end of the day, the UFL really becomes a math equation. Can the TV viewership and in-person attendance numbers sustain a league with eight teams of 50 professional football players? The size of the rosters certainly make it a more difficult equation than Unrivaled or TGL, which only have a handful of players per team to pay. There was already plenty of labor unrest prior to the start of this year’s UFL season. If the league’s numbers continue to decline, and therefore player salaries stagnate, more labor strife could be just around the corner.

About Drew Lerner

Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.