United Football League

I've been hearing some rumblings about a new professional football league that's about to leap from its nest this year, so I thought I'd check it out. Have you heard about the United Football League? I hadn't either until recently.

From perusing their website and a few other sports websites, the UFL appears to be starting its "Premiere" season in October of 2009 with four teams--Las Vegas, Orlando, New York, and San Francisco. Team names and uniforms will be introduced in early August, with team logos to be revealed in early September. They're apparently going to play games on Wednesday, Thursday, and/or Friday nights (depending on which article you believe) on the Versus Network, and play their Championship Game in Las Vegas over Thanksgiving weekend.

It's normal 11-on-11 football, and the rules are fairly similar to those in the NFL. Nothing crazy jumped out, like in the defunct XFL, where guys would run at each other from opposite ends of the field toward a ball on the 50-yard-line, and whoever wound up with the ball got possession to start the game. So NFL fans shouldn't have much difficulty understanding what's going on in UFL games.

The UFL's overtime rules are very similar to college football's overtime rules, where each team gets a crack at the end zone, as opposed to the NFL's sudden death model, where a coin flip determines the first possession, and whoever scores first wins.

There are some NFL has-beens and not-quites that you might recognize in the UFL: Mike Doss, Brooks Bollinger, and J.P. Losman, to name a few. The four coaches are familiar names: Jim Fassel (Las Vegas), Dennis Green (San Francisco), Jim Haslett (Orlando), and Ted Cottrell (New York). But there are lots of players I've never heard of, some from schools I've never heard of. There is some talk, though, of the UFL trying to sign Michael Vick and/or Plaxico Burress, depending on the length of suspensions the NFL's commissioner hands down for those guys' off-field behavior.

So we'll see how this goes, I guess. I suspect it will go the way of the XFL, the USFL, the WFL, the WLAF, and any other recent leagues other than the almighty NFL. Even the NFL's developmental league failed, NFL Europa, failed.

The Arena Football League is a noticeably different (and fun) game, and they wait to begin their season after the Super Bowl, knowing that it's too difficult to attract NFL fans during the NFL season. They've been around for a long time (22 seasons), but even they had to suspend the 2009 season because of lack of funding. And it's a fairly regular occurrence in the AFL for a team to go belly-up (as did our Indianapolis-based Indiana Firebirds in 2005 after relocating here from Albany in 2001). The AFL hopes to resume play in 2010, but nothing's set in stone yet.

I don't have a lot of hope for the UFL, since it will be filled with players and coaches who couldn't make it in the NFL, the rules and set-up are very similar to those of the NFL (providing very little that is unique to the league), and its season will run at the same time as the NFL's season and that of college football. But if it's too cold to go to a high school football game on a Friday night, maybe I'll check these guys out on Versus. After all, it's still football!