Credibility is an omnipresent issue for any organization that takes itself – and its survival – seriously, and that is never truer than for an organization that comes with more baggage than promise. The reborn United States Football League is a perfect example, attempting a coattail run rooted in a league that fell apart nearly four decades ago after a three-year struggle for longevity that was never to be, a struggle that grasped at the straws of promise that every spring league has flashed before it was devoured by any one of countless circumstances that lay in merciless wait.
From the league name, initials and logo down to its eight resurrected teams carrying the same identities as their 1980s ancestors, the familiarity may be helping to hide the reality of its fledgling status: It’s a new league of eight new teams. Its website has almost nothing to divulge about any of them. The site’s most prominent feature is a countdown clock that until a week ago attempted to herald the inaugural game’s kickoff down to the second. It just happened to be a day and several hours off, an early credibility failure that will be easily forgotten if the league delivers. But that’s an if that could dwarf Mount Rushmore.
Most of what the league is about is oozing out of other sources. Chief among them, somehow, is the XFL site playing the oddest competitor role in sports promotion history, and Fox has picked up the ball the past few months. The glaring absence of insight into the new league is startling: No explanation of why all the teams, while representing seven locales in name only, will play in one team’s city (Birmingham, Ala.) or for how long; no hint as to why the league extends no farther west than Houston or how it can succeed, even in the early going, if it ignores the giant media markets of the West; no inkling of a plan to foster franchise ownerships, a staple of any pro sports league with any hope of long-range survival; no source for fans to find out more; not even a media contact.
The obvious big boon for the new USFL is a major network television presence centered in Fox and NBC and bolstered by USA and FX1, but the first USFL had strong commitments from ABC and ESPN. Games were anchored for television by the likes of Keith Jackson and Bob Griese. Neither the networks nor the booth celebrities could rise to savior status in the end. True, it was a different time, and that always carries innumerable variables. The new version, like the old, is well stocked with coaches of considerable renown, and the sky’s the limit on who might show up to play a wind-down performance for the love of the game.
The AAF and the second coming of the XFL made it clear that America loves and wants pro football in the spring, but that has proven to be a shifty and fickle commodity that defies accurate prediction other than failure. The stage may be set for a lasting exception. If the new USFL can establish itself with enough credibility, its clock may run far longer and far better than its website’s opening cockeyed countdown. But history, replete with the old adage about a particular definition of insanity, is not on its side.