The United Football League is scheduled to kick off its second season tonight in a prime time game on Fox; that is assuming the players show up. Players and UFL owners – a coalition of Fox, ESPN, RedBird Capital and Dwayne Johnson – have been in tussle over a collective bargaining agreement.
Russ Brandon, president of the UFL, assured Awful Announcing there will be football tonight, CBA or not.
“We’re playing ball, so that’s what we’re focused on,” Brandon said. “The guys have been great at camp. They’ve been great with all of our media days, everything that we’ve done so we’re focused on playing ball.”
The CBA issue aside, the UFL, which formed last year after a merger of the USFL and XFL, is already one of the longer lasting spring leagues when counting those two leagues’ seasons. The USFL played in 2022 and 2023, and the XFL in ‘23.
Asked why the UFL will survive when there is a long lineage of failed spring leagues, Brandon cited cost controls as one reason.
“It’s because of ownership and because we’re building it the right way,” he said. “These leagues are expensive to run, and you have to go into it with your eyes wide open, and you can’t run it like the traditional model of the NFL.”
Asked if the rule of thumb with startup football leagues is that a $250 million spend over the first three seasons is necessary, Brandon replied that it is in the ballpark.
Last season, the UFL averaged 845,000 viewers across 43 games on ESPN and Fox. Attendance outside of St. Louis, which has rallied behind its team in part to stick it to the NFL for relocating the Rams to LA, was a struggle. There are two likely reasons behind this: the merger of the USFL and XFL occurred just months before 2024 UFL kickoff, and the eight teams are all housed in Arlington, Texas, and only travel to their home markets for games. This is designed to save costs, but it largely deprives teams of using players in community outreach during the season.
“We’re still building, we’re 14 months old and, we’re still, we’ve got teams in every market, meaning staffs,” he said. “So, think double A baseball when it comes to our staffing models, we have ticketing people on the ground, head of business, sponsorship, community relations, PR, that are in the marketplace, working year round, trying to build brands.”
The XFL has eight teams, but has had strong interest to a request for proposals for expansion cities, said Brandon.
The UFL is known for trying new technologies and changes to the game before the NFL, from the new kickoff formations, to digitally tracking where the first down line is.
ESPN this year has a few new developments. Two players per team will wear chest cams, said Bill Bonnell, ESPN’s lead producer for the UFL. Bonnell expects one will be the defensive player who calls formations on each team.
“So we’ll be able to see the output from the chest of that player and the audio,” he said. “So from a defensive standpoint, it would be really cool to be able to listen to the play call, and watch that player look to the left and the right, and see the adjustments, and also be able to hear him make the defensive calls and stuff.”
Another new feature this year is when players on the sidelines examine plays on iPads, ESPN will be able to show what they’re looking at, with sideline reporters allowed to hover over the sideline study sessions. And head coaches and backup quarterbacks will wear headsets that allow the announcers to ask them questions.
“I look at it like a blank canvas or a sandbox where you’re able to mold it the way you want to in, in that whatever we do on the UFL can eventually be applied to, NFL broadcast or, college,” Bonnell said.
The UFL hopes to capture some of college football’s success with a weekly Friday night game on Fox, a move that could bolster the healthy ratings from year one.
Of course, one pressing issue with the appeal of minor leagues is always the quality of play, which is more pronounced in football with the importance of good quarterback play and the scarcity of top performers at that position. So, Brandon in part sells the league as allowing fans to watch future NFL players, noting 51 former UFL competitors are under contract on NFL teams.
To overcome the lack of recognizable players, Bonnell said ESPN is working on “humanizing”
them by producing stories about their journeys. He cited Jared Thomas, a Big 10 Network analyst last year who is a lineman on the Memphis team.
“So he’s an aspiring broadcaster, and also a left guard for the Memphis Showboats,” Bonnell said. “Humanize and really give our viewers a vested interest in watching these players week to week. That’s the fun of it.”
About Daniel Kaplan
Daniel Kaplan has been covering the business of sports for more than two decades. A proud founding reporter of SportsBusiness Journal, he spent the last four years at The Athletic.