May 31 2007
Three Better Football League Ideas than the UFL
Apparently, Mark Cuban is actually serious about creating a scarecrow to compete with Michelangelo’s David. He even suggested on his blog that the NFL is ripe for the picking. Really?
2. The NFL wants and needs competition. They have grown so big and powerful that every move they make is scrutinized by local or federal officials. A competitor allows them to point to us and explain that their moves are for competitive reasons rather than the move of a monopoly.
Oh, look! There’s Mac OS X! Microsoft isn’t a monopoly after all!
3. They just extended their CBA. Their CBA structure is not designed for a competitive environment. Competition for top players, even if the UFL gets just a few, increases prices at the top end for all teams. Every star will get paid more, but still have to fit under the cap. That forces teams to use more low cost players, at the expense of signing the middle of the roster. That gives us access to quite a few very, very good NFL players.
Like Aaron Brooks. And Charles Rogers. And Chris Gardocki. Oooh, pinch me.
4. There are a lot of markets that are bigger than some current NFL markets that do not have teams that would love to have a pro football team.
No, Mark, there are a lot of markets that would love to have an NFL team. There’s a difference. Cities don’t want to be part of a startup football league — especially cities in Texas, who will refuse to support a league that plays on Friday nights in the fall. They have teenagers for that.
Seriously, I can give you three football codes off the top of my head that would result in more compelling sports product that this United Football League of yours:
- Futsal. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — a well-funded, well-marketed pro futsal league could do very well in America. Despite what the naysayers will tell you, a good chunk of the American population is willing to embrace soccer in its many forms, and futsal is a FIFA-sanctioned football code, so teams can play internationally. Quality futsal players are as flashy with their feet as Magic Johnson was with his hands, which is a draw itself. Plus, if those players are properly developed, their contracts can be sold off to any football club in the world. Oh, and you could start an entire futsal league for less than half of what a UFL franchise could cost. You’ve got $12M to burn, eh, Cubes?
- Rugby union. Remember how soccer-mad the U.S. went during the FIFA World Cup? You don’t think they couldn’t go rugby mad during this year’s upcoming Rugby World Cup if ESPN gets its hands on it, or if Team USA is successful? (Granted, success in a group with England and South Africa is finishing 3rd and qualifying automatically for 2011, but still…) Unlike the UFL, an American Rugby Union Association has plenty to differentiate itself from other football leagues in America, and because it’s also an international code, it has the potential for future matches against the best clubs in Europe and the southern hemisphere. Oh, and the code itself is even being tweaked to help speed up the pace of the game and make it more appealing to the fans. You could start the whole league for $30M and build an audience from the ground up.
- Punch Football. Okay, I’m joking, but it would work just about as well as the UFL, wouldn’t it?
Of course, I don’t have the business savvy of my fellow IU alum, or else I would have created web 2.0 site and sold it to Yahoo for millions of dollars myself by now. Still, I have enough sense to recognize a non-starter when I see it. Like that Palm Foleo. Hey, there’s an idea — a crippled compact laptop to complement the smartphone that we bought so that we wouldn’t have to haul around a laptop in the first place. Brilliant. When’s that iPhone coming out again?
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